Movie Revews: Predators, [REC] 2, Great Directors, Cropsey

THE KIDS ARE ALL RIGHT Serious comedy, powered by an enthusiastic cast and full of good-natured innuendo, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right gives adolescent coming-of-age and the battle of the sexes a unique twist, in part by creating a romantic triangle between a long-standing, devoutly bourgeois lesbian couple, Nic and Jules (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore), and the newly identified, merrily free-spirited sperm donor, Paul (Mark Ruffalo), responsible for both the couple's teenage children. Normality, as made clear by the introductory family dinner that features two mothers acting all motherly, rules. (The moms' designated kink is their occasional use of gay male porn as an aphrodisiac.) Whereas Cholodenko's two previous features, High Art (1998) and Laurel Canyon (2003), each focused on an innocent young woman swept up in the glamorously baffling sex-and-drugs scene swirling around a charismatic older female artist, the situation here is reversed; unexpectedly drawn into and fascinated by the ultradomestic household created by a pair of charismatic femmes, the swinger is the straight man (literally). Premiered last January at Sundance, The Kids Are All Right triggered a lively bidding war. The enthusiasm is unsurprising: It's actually a pretty conservative movie. Given its juicy premise, The Kids could have been played for sitcom, reality show or soap opera — had it been made in 1970, it might have been an Echo Park Teorema, with everyone winding up in bed together. Ten years into the 21st century, it's a heartfelt poster for family values. (J. Hoberman) (Arclight Hollywood, Fallbrook)

PREDATORS This Robert Rodriguez–produced sequel goes back into the bush to follow 1987's Predator — a sci-fi horror that put the multimegaton American stud-soldiers of Reagan-era action in the infrared, stalking POV of a higher-tech galactic Superpower. This time, U.S. black ops turned soldier-of-fortune Royce (Adrien Brody, knotty with new muscle) literally plummets into uncharted jungle terrain. Mind-wiped and stranded, he finds a likewise-disoriented gaggle of international badmen yanked from Mexican cartels, the Chechnyan front, Sierra Leonean death squadrons and death row, rounded out by a femme sniper (Alice Braga) and an unarmed comic-relief Topher Grace. Middle-range genre man Nimród Antal (Control, Armored) carries the burden of franchise-expectation without undue solemnity, conducting his Dirty Octet through the slow-dawning revelation that they're on a game preserve, handpicked for Predator hunters — then cranking up the grinder. The loyalties and tensions in this hell-is-other-mercenaries premise might have been more deviously rigged. There could be more open pleasure in the exploitation-movie concept (only Walton Goggins' con really basks in villainy). Louis Ozawa Changchien's silent Yakuza suddenly stopping for a samurai showdown makes no sense unless motivated by inscrutable Asian motives. But doing The Most Dangerous Game is, for action directors, what covering "Satisfaction" is to bar bands; if you hit most of the notes, it'll do. (Nick Pinkerton)

Despicable Me

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[REC] 2 The de facto highlight of the horrific [REC] 2 — the 28-minutes-later sequel to the Spanish zombie flick Americanized as Quarantine — comes when a bug-eyed, crucifix-clutching priest (Jonathan Mellor) tries in vain to extract a blood sample from a demonically possessed young pea-soup-spitter while SWAT-team studs with itchy trigger fingers lie in wait. In other words, where the overrated [REC] was a Blair Witchy riff on George A. Romero's Dead reckonings, the s(l)icker follow-up — again set almost entirely in an apartment building overrun by the hungry infected, and shot through the survivors' shakycams — principally channels The Exorcist and Aliens, but none too memorably. Contrived panic abounds, as do expiring camcorder batteries and expletive-laden variations on "Shoot it in the head!" Meantime, subtext and even text remain scant unless one counts the creeping misogyny of a script in which pure evil tends to be female, whether the flesh is underage, withered, ravaged or nubile. Predictably, [REC] 2 is higher-budgeted than its bare-bones predecessor, which only means that the spectacular degradation of video in scenes where the zombies get in close and start chomping will test the limits of any HDTV. If only [REC] 2's rabid baddies knew how to push [STOP]. (Rob Nelson) (Sunset 5)