puckishlau
I love how Jules stand in front of the TV and say what she wanna say for Nic and the families; it's so real and satisfying to look at someone who did wrong and hurt her families; being brave and confessed why she did wrong and the reason was so true that when we stayed in a relationship for too long, it's easy to hurt the one you loved the most, to feel being loved and let the one to feel how painful or torturing your loved one gave you (even the love remains unchanged, it just like what jules said: just two people slogging through the shit, year after year, getting older, changing.)Great writer and director, turning some daily life events into an interesting story line, with no muss and no fuss, no dragging on any story line. And seriously, all of the main actresses and actors deserved the prize of their years for this movie already.A little late, but I'm still glad to have the opportunity to watch this movie tonight.
juneebuggy
This was very good, just perfect performances from Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as well as a heartfelt and honest telling of the modern family. I would label it a dramedy as it has its humorous moments but is more on the true-to-life side of things.The story follows Jules (Moore) and Nic (Bening) who have been together for almost 20 years and have two teenage children both conceived through artificial insemination. Unknown to their mothers the kids seek out their biological father, restaurateur (Mark Ruffalo). Complications arise as they invite him into their lives and start to bond with him.The portrayal of family here is very realistic, Annette Bening is a type A personality, trying to do it all and keep it all together while drinking copious amounts of wine, her wife Julianne Moore is super laid back, still trying to find herself. Yes they are dysfunctional but aren't we all. Mark Ruffalo holds his own with these two women and I enjoyed his character too, another free spirit, sort of lost and realizing that he wants a family. Great acting all round. 5/16/16
philipmagnier
I quickly read some of the reviews for this and was surprised at all the people who hated it. I thought it was great. It's non-judgmental and, to me, makes sense as it unfolds and it has sympathy for all the characters, all of them.I liked that it was low key and I admired Benning and Moore for presenting themselves as middle aged without being made up like movie stars. The writing lets the plot unfold and doesn't force any of the sequences: this could have easily been a lamp-throwing melodrama.There aren't too many adult films with heart out out there nowadays but this is one of them. A film for our times.
hamass-mujadid
Don't look at this movie individually; look at it retrospectively with Linklater's Sunrise trilogy (especially Before Midnight) and Brokeback Mountain and you'll love it even better. Its smooth-flowing and ordinariness is also comparable to the fluency of Alexander Payne's Sideways, which was an "alcoholic" masterpiece, surely.The Kids Are All Right is a colloquial reference to an unusual situation—kids wanting to meet the part-engenderer of their existence. Brought up in a lesbian household, Joni's (daughter) eighteenth birthday is followed by Laser's request to contact their mothers' (Julianne Moore and Annette Bening) sperm donor (Mark Ruffalo), and so the movie follows a low-pitched, conversational, and touchy discourse. Nic is the man of the lesbian household; she controls everything, being the only breadwinner of the family. The unconventional family goes with sperm donor's eventual involvement and interaction with kids and other kin with consent, conflict, ambiguity, judgment, and family-thing, that is, argument, disappointment, fragmentation, and upheaval. There's implied bias for both spouses on relationship with each others' biological offspring, and although no such thing is genuinely true, it's used as perfecting the rituals and situations of nearly all couples, conventional or not. There is inequality for sure, and that's used as a means by Nic to show her command of the shaft. The movie employs a chronology up until Joni's first day of college which is conducive to the ultimate rehabilitation of the whole family, without the sperm donor, of course.Paul's character is in question at so many places. He's been brilliantly portrayed by Ruffalo who's had a similar role in Begin Again, where he is an inconsistent and tormented father along with being a struggling song-producer, which he again did brilliantly. He's a good actor—Ruffalo. Paul is in between nothing; he's a college-dropout, but owns an above-average restaurant. His involvement with Jules is a plot of the movie, with many others, Joni Mitchell, and Indian employ being two of them. The little yet filling details made The Kids Are All Right a movie that seems like you're watching the exact life in your neighborhood.With everything said, I think it was Lisa Cholodenko's big and only one shot. Every once in a while, even a crow becomes a falcon. She might have pulled it out of nothing, and her idea, which was nothing but a regular production, turned out to be eccentrically attractive to many, out of good-luck and somewhat unprecedented potential. But it's very unlikely that she'll write any such piece ever again. However, it doesn't mean that The Kids Are All Right was an accidental discovery. I just think that even Lisa wouldn't have thought that highly of her script before its release.From Paul's BMW to Laser's skateboard, everything was perfectly synced together, and in those one-hundred and something minutes, I felt like I watched the gay version of Modern Family. It felt comedic, yet lively, and quite appropriable to what actually happens in lives, not necessarily unconventional ones. Actually if you look at it, after some time, it doesn't really matter if it's a hetro- or homo-; the groundwork is always same. The tags and gigs are all the same.More than anything else, Annette Bening's authoritarian character was most flabbergasting. She was terribly good with Nic, and honestly looked like the practical head of the family. Her gait, expressions, and voice was at times pretty totalitarian, and I personally felt sorry for Jules (Julianne Moore) and her tenderness.The honesty with which Lisa's presented this idea is simply commendable. It might seem like an easy-going, totally-happening script, but the reality is immensely different. You can't think of so every-day ideas, and present them with the same ease as real-life. Movies are more taken as action, and drama (melodrama is more like it), but coming up with something which underlines the questions that actually come from the growing minds of all families is finite and very confined. So yeah, hats off to Lisa, and Annette for being the core of the movie. I hope to see more of TKAAR thingies.
