The performances in this movie are all fine, but Annette Bening, in particular, delivers a tour de force, perhaps the best of her acting career. She clearly has never had cosmetic surgery and fearlessly lets the seams show in a movie that makes constant use of close-ups. It's fair to say she even lets herself look a little older than her 52 years.

As far as I could see, Bening and her co-star, Julianne Moore, are not even wearing make-up during the movie. I never knew Moore is covered in freckles.

The Kids are All Right depicts a family that goes into crisis because of adultery. It also has some funny elements. Bening is Nic, a hard-drinking doctor and the family breadwinner. Moore is Jules, her gay partner, who is trying to start a landscaping business. Their two teenagers, on the sly, contact the sperm donor they have never met who is biological father to both of them. He turns out to be Paul, played by Mark Ruffalo, owner of a small, organic foods restaurant. Eventually, he comes to be a family friend, and, eventually, more than that.

This is the kind of movie containing scenes you want to discuss after. The "Joni Mitchell" scene at the dinner table. Nic forcing a confession out of Jules. Jules shutting off the TV and delivering her apology (this is really Nic's scene as she lets the depths of her heartbreak finally show).

Having praised the praiseworthy elements in Kids, I want to discuss the flaws. The movie so wants to be NOT about lesbian parenthood, but about a southern California family whose parents happen to be lesbians. It does not want to be a gimmick movie. If that is so, then the movie's plot should be able to work equally well if the parents were man and woman, and it could, even with the sperm donor angle. But would you plunk down $10 to see that movie? Think about it.

Also, the movie works the diversity angle too hard. Not only do we have gay parenthood, we have not one, but two, interracial romance angles going on. Paul's longtime girlfriend Tanya is not only a dark African-American beauty, but she wears African jewelry and sports a large afro hairdo. I half expected her to turn up in a dashiki. Daughter Joni has a major crush on a handsome fellow student who is of Indian or Pakistani descent and, at a party, gets drunk and plants a big sloppy kiss on him. See folks, white-skinned people can be drawn to dark- skinned people. Especially if they are beautiful.

A scene that bothered me showed Paul watching Jules work in his garden. She is squatting and he can see she is wearing a thong. Would a woman who is a professional landscaper and is dressed for a day spent squatting in the dirt also wear a thong? Aren't thongs a tad uncomfortable?

Oh, and Paul is not only a male, he is a MALE. Though he is a fine actor, one is tempted to think Ruffalo was hired because of how hairy he is. He's tanned, muscular and barrel-chested. Rides a motorcycle. And when Jules pulls his pants down the first time, her eyes widen in appreciation. There's even some mild S&M in the sex scenes. Here, no doubt, is the source of the complaints by many in the gay community that the movie carries a subtext that if a lesbian could find a real manly man, she would go straight. The movie could have gone on to show that Jules discovers she is bisexual with a preference for women, but it does not. She simply made an inexplicable "bad choice."

Finally, the sex scenes are pure Hollywood R. You know what I mean -- non-explicit explicit. After sex, the bed is covered with that special sheet that comes up to the man's waist, but up to the woman's armpits.

The Kids are All Right is trying hard to be "organic." But it comes off as somewhat synthetic.