From left, Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Josh Hutcherson, Mia Wasikowska, Mark Ruffalo.

Two moms; two kids; one sperm donor. Not a conventional family unit in the minds of many.

But no matter what your politics or moral views dictate, “The Kids Are All Right” conveys sentiments and truths about family ties and families coming unraveled that are universal. And it does so with great wit, wisdom and warmth — not to mention obvious originality — through the smart and deeply sensitive performances of its principal players under the knowing direction of Lisa Cholodenko (“High Art,” “Laurel Canyon”), who co-wrote the original screenplay with Stuart Blumberg (“Keeping the Faith”).

Annette Bening and Julianne Moore are enormously engaging and endearing as Nic and Jules, respectively, longtime partners in a lesbian marriage, living a cozy suburban life in Los Angeles with their two teenage children, Joni (Mia Wasikowska, fantastic in “Alice in Wonderland”), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15, who were conceived with the help of the same anonymous donor. Nic gave birth to Joni and Jules brought Laser into the world, and the kids refer to their parents as “Moms” in lieu of “Mom and Mom” or “Mom and Dad.” (“Don’t tell Moms,” “What will Moms think?” etc.)

Nic, a doctor, is the high-strung, confident alpha half of the couple who enforces the house rules, while Jules is the sweeter and more vulnerable of the two, the mostly stay-at-home parent who has tried different jobs, attended architectural school and now wants to try her hand at landscape designing.

It’s a reasonably comfortable and happy home, save for the midlife tensions caused by Joni’s impending departure for college, and Jules’ indecision about what to do with the next stage of her life. But then the kids decide on their own to satisfy a natural, nagging curiosity to seek out their biological father.

And they find Paul (a shaggily charming Mark Ruffalo), a hip, affable, carefree bachelor and successful natural-food restaurateur who motorcycles into the family’s life and turns things upside down, first winning the hearts of the kids and then the off-balance and open Jules, who gladly tends his garden in more ways than one. Even the brittle and guarded Nic begins to warm to him, until she sees how their family framework is suddenly beginning to break apart at the joists.

At this point, the battle is joined, among kids and moms and the newfound dad, who’s decided he wants to join the fold. It’s a familiar story told with modern twists, which makes this film all the more eye-opening and entertaining in its 21st-century way of examining age-old familial foibles.

Don’t get the idea, however, that this movie about family is suited for family viewing. This is strictly adult fare, with raw sex scenes — mostly of the heterosexual variety — and situations speaking plainly to mature and hopefully open-minded audiences.

At turns tough, tender and tumultuously funny thanks to the pitch-perfect performances of a well-chosen ensemble cast, a gifted director and a brilliant and heartfelt script, here’s a film that truly hits close to home.

— Gene Triplett

MOVIE REVIEW

“The Kids Are All Right”

R
1:44
3½ stars

Starring: Annette Bening, Julianne Moore, Mark Ruffalo, Mia Wasikowska, Josh Hutcherson.

(Strong sexual content, nudity, language, some teen drug and alcohol use)

BY GENE TRIPLETT

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — Julianne Moore seemed amused that it was Father’s Day morning and she was here to talk about her role as one-half of a couple of lesbian moms in “The Kids

Annette Bening, left, and Julianne Moore

 Are All Right.”

“Happy Father’s Day,” was her bright greeting to all the male reporters around the interview table as she entered a sun-filled suite at the Four Seasons Hotel. “Oh my goodness, it was so nice of all of you to come out on Father’s Day to work.

“I have a pedicure planned for my husband,” allowed the radiant, lightly freckled redhead with the smiling blue-green eyes as she pulled up a chair.

“That’s awfully nice,” a journalist remarked.

“Yeah, I’m not gonna do it,” she quickly assured everyone.

Moore has enjoyed a long-term relationship and marriage to director Bart Freundlich and is raising two children, much like the woman she portrays in “The Kids Are All Right.” But the big difference is Moore’s character, Jules, is married to a woman named Nic, played by Annette Bening, in director Lisa Cholodenko’s comedy-drama about family ties and trials.

Jules and Nic are also raising two kids, Joni (Mia Wasikowska), 18, and Laser (Josh Hutcherson), 15, both happy and well-adjusted youngsters, until one day they decide to find and meet the anonymous sperm donor who fathered them.

Enter Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a hip natural-foods restaurant owner and footloose bachelor who is an immediate hit with the kids, then with the vulnerable Jules in a way that she’s never experienced. Even the brittle family breadwinner Nic begins to warm to Paul’s easygoing charm after a while — until his presence begins to cause family ties to unravel.

Sure, a gay marriage is part of the premise here, Moore said, but it’s certainly not the issue.

“I thought it was incredibly charming,” she said. “Really, really moving and important, because it’s a portrait of a marriage, you know, a middle-aged marriage and what it means to be committed and what it’s like to be in a family and how you grow up, and how do you move away from your parents and still stay connected, and stuff that’s pretty universal.”

Moore was the first actor to become attached to the project in 2005, and she believed in it enough to hang in there through all the struggles an independent production faces, including financing, casting and personal matters, such as Cholodenko’s pregnancy from artificial insemination.

“I met her, I think it was in this hotel at a Women in Film luncheon, and told her how much I loved her work. I loved ‘Laurel Canyon,’ I loved ‘High Art,’” Moore said. “I said I hoped we’d work together, and by the end of that year, she sent me the script to ‘The Kids Are All Right,’ and it was a long process. … But it was always there and always kind of alive, and I had every intention of doing it. I love Lisa, and I love her work.”

Moore insists there are no political pitches for gay marriage in this screenplay by Cholodenko and co-writer Stuart Blumberg, just a portrait of a kind of family that exists in real life but is not often depicted on-screen, dealing with common family problems.

“They’re a very traditional family,” she said. “I mean more conservative and traditional than most families. I mean they have one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. I know very few people like that these days. Out of necessity most parents work. So they’re kind of fortunate and incredibly bourgeois.”

Moore thinks even moviegoers from the right end of the political spectrum can appreciate the family picture presented in “The Kids Are All Right.”

“There was a study, it was about don’t ask, don’t tell,” she said. “The thing that most changes opinions is proximity. Proximity and knowledge. So if you’re in a unit with a guy who’s gay, and you didn’t know he was gay and you find out, and you think, ‘Hey, he’s a regular guy. Wow, look, that’s not so different,’ it’s the same thing with gay families. If you are living in a neighborhood and there’s a same-sex family next door to you, you think, ‘Wow, you guys are doing the same things.’ That is what is slowly changing popular opinion. And I think that movies in a sense don’t influence culture as much as they reflect it. …

“I mean, it really is interesting and complicated and funny, because you realize people are, you know, we’re all dealing with the same stuff, oddly, because we all live in the same world.”

Moore hopes audiences take away the film’s real intended message.

“I really think it’s about how important families are,” she said. “It’s a wonderful look at a long-term relationship, what it’s like to be parents, to grow up a family, and I think it’s a reminder of how much we cherish it, how much we should, you know?”

Travel and accommodations provided by Focus Features.

Edoardo Gabbriellini and Tilda Swinton

There’s such a tactile richness of detail and extravagant emotional lushness to director Luca Guadagnino’s modern melodrama “I Am Love” that it’s easy to overlook the austere spareness of the story.

It’s in the lavish layering-on of exquisite detail from the privileged, old-world lives of its characters and in the perfectly modulated performances of the cast (especially the masterly Tilda Swinton) that the film achieves its baroque, operatic allure.

At its heart, “I Am Love” (in Italian with subtitles) is an artfully sensuous, leisurely effort to revisit the aching melodrama that so marked the works of Douglas Sirk (“All That Heaven Allows”) and gave his tortured heroines such potently ironic dilemmas.

On the surface, the dilemma of Swinton’s Emma Ricchi, beautiful matriarch of a wealthy Milan clan, seems pretty straight forward. On one hand, she’s comfortably ensconced in a life that revolves around family, a stately villa, elaborate dinner parties and the family’s textile business. The strictures of her passionless, slightly boring world are embodied by her straight-laced, conscientious son, Tancredi (Pippo Delbono), who is poised to assume partial control of the business.

On the other hand, Emma’s rigidly conservative world is shaken when she encounters Antonio (Edoardo Gabbriellini), a gifted, handsome but humble young chef who hopes to open a restaurant with Emma’s grandson Edoardo (Flavio Parenti). Edo’s breaking away from family ties, along with her daughter Elisabetta’s (Alba Rohrwacher) coming out as a lesbian, embody a forbidden sense of freedom and sensuality that stir long repressed desires within Emma.

When Emma falls into a passionate love affair with Antonio, the stage is set for a heavily symbolic battle for her soul.

Writer-director Guadagnino, who reportedly spent years with his partner Swinton plotting out the essence of their story, proves himself brilliant at advancing the action through image and simmering emotion, with a minimum of dialogue. The going is slow and self-indulgent at times. But everything in Emma’s sober, suffocating world, and in her bold sexual awakening, is depicted in ravishing visuals that feel like an orgy of materialism, liberation, grief, gluttony, guilt and sex.

It’s all effectively underscored with stark, musical counterpoints by acclaimed minimalist composer John Adams (“Nixon in China”) and given needed psychological heft by the deeply layered performance of Swinton, an actress whose ethereal gifts even manage to make the story’s contrived climax seem plausible if not totally satisfying.

“I Am Love” is a swooning exercise in virtuoso acting and intellectual filmmaking. Its melodrama may be the stuff of old Hollywood formula, but in the best possible way it represents an artful triumph of style over substance.

- Dennis King

“I Am Love”

R
2:00
3 stars
Starring: Tilda Swinton, Edoardo Gabbriellini, Flavio Parenti, Alba Rohrwacher
(Sexuality and nudity)

As comedies of cruelty go, it’s hard to beat the French when it comes to dispensing Gallic gall.

But an Americanized effort at just that arrives in theaters this weekend in “Dinner for Schmucks,” which attempts a trans-Atlantic spin on French writer-director Francis Veber’s 1998 social farce “The Dinner Game” (“Le diner de cons”). Veber is a mainstay of French commercial cinema whose works have often been tepidly adapted for American release (see “The Birdcage,” “Pure Luck,” “Fathers’ Day,” “The Man With One Red Shoe,” “The Fugitives”).

It remains to be seen how well the mean-spirited idea of “The Dinner Game” translates to American tastes, but for those who prefer their bile in unadulterated doses the DVD version of Veber’s film (in French with subtitles) is readily available.

“The Dinner Game” serves up a satisfying scenario in which the idiots turn the tables on the jerks.

The story rests on a deliciously wicked premise. Every Wednesday, a group of snooty Paris businessmen stages an elaborate dinner party. The chief entertainment? Each diner is charged with bringing a guest, “a grade-A idiot,” whose witless foibles are intended to provide the evening’s amusement for the snide hosts. The winner is the man who invites the biggest dolt.

Pierre (Thierry Lhermitte), a smug, wealthy publisher, figures he’s happened on a sure prize when he meets Pignon (Danny DeVito doppleganger Jacques Villeret), a schlubby government accountant whose hobby is building matchstick models of famous monuments and then talking about them endlessly. Did you know, it took 346,422 matchsticks to construct his Eiffel Tower?

But, as fate would have it, Pierre injures his back on the night of the party. And before he can call Pignon to cancel, the clueless, good-natured guest has shown up at Pierre’s chic apartment, and the two men spend a mishap-filled evening together in which the helpful Pignon unwittingly brings chaos into every corner of Pierre’s cushy life.

Throughout, Pignon is such a selfless nice guy, and Pierre is such an unregenerate stinker, that we can sympathize entirely with the guest’s benevolent bumbling and the host’s well-deserved suffering.

The farce never lags, and the laughs are as prickly as they are tickly. Think of “The Dinner Game” as “Revenge of the Nerds” served up Continental style. “You avenged all the idiots who attended our dinners for all time!” moans Pierre as the film draws to a close. To which Pignon gently replies, “Think twice before you call anyone an idiot.”

- Dennis King

Selena Gomez and Joey King

“Ramona and Beezus” is that rarest of summer multiplex enterprises – a G-rated movie for kids and parents that isn’t juiced by computer-generated effects or noisy explosions and isn’t crowded with cutesy animated creatures or comic-book superheroes and villains.

It’s refreshingly human-scale and low-tech. It’s literate and funny. And it displays an embracing empathy for both the frustrations and confusions of childhood and the responsibilities and confusions of adulthood.

Not surprising since it’s drawn from the novels of much-honored, best-selling children’s author Beverly Cleary, a wise and wonderful writer (and former librarian) who in more than 30 books over 50 years has spoken to several generations of loyal readers.

In “Ramona and Beezus,” the first big-screen adaptation of her work, it’s highly likely that grandparents, parents and youngsters in audiences will have come to reading through her characters and stories.

Adroitly adapted from several of Cleary’s popular “Ramona” books and deftly directed by Elizabeth Allen (“Aquamarine”), this tale brings to vivid life the author’s teeming, beloved Klickitat Street in suburban Portland, Oregon. There, the Quimby family resides in cozy if chaotic domesticity. Loving parents Robert and Dorothy (John Corbett and Bridget Moynahan) patiently ride herd over big sister Beezus (Disney star Selena Gomez), cooing baby Roberta, lay-around cat Picky-Picky and the pesky, imaginative, non-conformist Ramona (newcomer Joey King – no relation to the reviewer).

The film unfolds in overlapping episodes, mostly concerning 9-year-old Ramona’s fumbled efforts to fit in at school and get along with her straight-A big sister. Ramona refuses to color between the lines, makes up words like “terrifical,” is always getting into scrapes and tests the last nerve of her long-suffering teacher Mrs. Meacham (Sandra Oh).

While there are lots of comic antics concerning Ramona and her best pal Henry Huggins (Hutch Dano), the film also pays smart attention to the concerns of grown-ups around her. When Dad loses his job and Mom goes back to work, the familiar old house on Klickitat faces foreclosure. And when roguish, globe-trotting photographer Hobart (Josh Duhamel) returns home, he clearly has designs to lure away Ramona’s warmly supportive Aunt Bea (Ginnifer Goodwin) to the wilds of Alaska, even though he cruelly jilted her after high school.

Much ruminating on problems takes place in Ramona’s florid imagination, which the filmmakers smartly depict in tactile, child-like special effects employing miniatures, models, toys and simple blue-screen techniques that neatly support the film’s overall storybook quality.

Performances are appealing and spot-on throughout. Duhamel and Goodwin are especially engaging as the coyly sparking adults. The multi-talented Gomez is largely cast as a goody-two-shoes foil to Ramona’s kiddie-punk rebel, but she handles the role with uncommon grace and self-possession. The bright-eyed King in her first starring role is a dynamo of cuteness and precociousness, with just the right touch of tartness.

In the burgeoning, high-tech library of summer movies, “Ramona and Beezus’ is a literate oasis of good old-fashioned storytelling. As they say in the publishing business, it’s a good read.

- Dennis King

“Ramona and Beezus”

G
1:44
3 stars
Starring: Joey King, Selena Gomez, John Corbett, Bridget Moynahan, Josh Duhamel

This week, the most interesting DVD to appear on release lists is:

“21 Jump Street: The Complete Series”

Long before he was the moody, virtuoso actor often mentioned in the same breath with Brando and James Dean, Johnny Depp was a moody, struggling young actor looking for a break. That came when he was cast as a baby-faced undercover cop in Fox TV’s groundbreaking series “21 Jump Street,” whose full five seasons will be released in an 18 DVD collection on Tuesday.

Depp, along with Dustin Nguyen, Holly Robinson Peete, Peter DeLuise and Steven Williams, were cast in the series as young L.A. police officers able to pass as high school and college students in order to go undercover for special investigations. The series, created by Patrick Hasburgh and Stephen J. Cannell (“The A-Team,” “The Rockford Files”) and based on an actual LAPD squad, ran from 1987-91.

Over its 103 episodes, the series dealt with timely social issues and featured an amazing guest roster of established and up-and-coming stars, including Brad Pitt, Vince Vaughn, Jason Priestley, Josh Brolin, Christina Applegate, Bridget Fonda, Dom DeLuise, Rosie Perez, John Waters, Shannen Doherty, Thomas Haden Church, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and more.

Depp, cast as maverick detective Tom Hanson, saw his star rise with the series, but he had initially been reluctant to accept the role. He signed a six-year contract, but told friends he didn’t think the show would last more than one season. But, largely due to his matinee-idol presence, the show was a hit, and by the third season Depp was eager to leave and move on to lucrative movie roles coming his way.

Back stories abound about Depp’s restlessness and disenchantment with the series (he complained about scripts and often rebelled by arbitrarily changing his lines), and after the fourth season he was released from his contract and moved on to his strange, breakthrough, big-screen role in “Edward Scissorhands.”

“21 Jump Street: The Complete Series” is not rated and features 18 discs in a special boxed set. Total running time is about 78 hours. It’s being released by Mill Creek Entertainment.

- Dennis King

Angelina Jolie

BY DENNIS KING

Having passed the half-way point of summer’s big-bucks movie season, film fans must now be asking themselves: Is the popcorn box half full or half empty?

Traditionally, Hollywood studios frontload the lucrative summer season with the hottest attractions in May, June and early July (the better to wring longer, profitable runs from blockbusters during vacation and school’s-out time).

So, late July and the dog days of August aren’t usually as packed with big tent-pole movies each and every weekend.

A quick look at release calendars for the remaining weeks through Labor Day seems to bear that out.

With box-office under performers like “Sex and the City 2,” “Prince of Persia,” “Robin Hood” and “Knight and Day” still hanging on to screens, with big-foot profit makers like “Toy Story 3” and “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse” still selling tickets, and with intriguing adult fare like “Inception” creating a buzz among moviegoers, the summer seems far from over.

But peer deeper into the bottom of the popcorn box and it looks like just a few fully blossomed kernels and a lot of grannies are left to be consumed.

This weekend promises a little “Salt” to spice up the multiplex fare, and the much hyped Angelina Jolie spy thriller from reliable director Phillip Noyce (“Clear and Present Danger,” “Patriot Games”) certainly qualifies as a big-deal summer release.

But beyond that, weekend release rosters just seem to get thinner and weedier.

The last weekend in July hosts a less-than-explosive trio of wide releases – the social farce, “Dinner for Schmucks” (a remake of Frenchman Francis Veber’s “The Dinner Game”), the silly, petcentric sequel “Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore” and the mystical baseball romance “Charlie St. Cloud” – with either very specialized or very limited appeal.

The same can be said for the entire month of August, with few releases that truly qualify as “events.”

Julia Roberts

Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg’s cop buddy comedy, “The Other Guys,” ushers in August on the 6th, hopefully giving Ferrell a chance to make people forget about “The Land of the Lost.” Then on August 13, Julia Roberts goes all touchy-feely and philosophical in the book-to-movie adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert’s “Eat Pray Love.” That shares the weekend with a film version of the obsessive comic-book favorite “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” and the old Hollywood-style, star-packed action saga “The Expendables” (with Sylvester Stallone directing and starring with a crew that includes Jet Li, Jason Statham, Dolph Lundgren, Eric Roberts, Mickey Rourke, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis).

After August 20’s “Nanny McPhee Returns,” a sequel to Emma Thompson’s warmly quirky tale of a magical, potato-nosed nanny who rescues a dysfunctional British family, the summer seems to fizzle out.

Left over are things like the gimmicky “Piranha 3-D,” the slapdash “Twilight” spoof “Vampires Suck,” a Drew Barrymore romantic comedy called “Going the Distance,” a last-gasp Jennifer Aniston comedy from the dying Miramax titled “The Switch” and a hardboiled detective tale with Matt Dillon titled “Takers.”

But if Labor Day weekend marks both the end of summer and the beginning of the fall-holiday movies season, then both of them promise to go off with a bang. The Sept. 3 weekend boasts two strong finishers-starters for the transition of seasons.

Austin maverick Robert Rodriguez teams up with his favorite craggy-faced star Danny Trejo for “Machete,” a revenge yarn in which a hired assassin is double crossed and sets out to assassinate those who would assassinate him. Then George Clooney takes up arms in “The American,” another assassin’s tale with Clooney’s hired killer hiding out in an Italian village contemplating one last tricky assignment.

From that weekend on to Christmas and New Year, our popcorn boxes will again be overflowing.

A movie doesn’t automatically qualify as classic film noir just because it has cops and robbers, ruthless femme fatales, a lot of night scenes and was shot in black and white between 1940 and 1960.

With Volume 5 of “The Film Noir Classic Collection,” Warner Home Video seems to be scraping the bottom of the B-movie bin, at least in the case of three of the eight films offered in this boxed set.

For example, “Crime in the Streets” (1956) is a low-budget, second-rate “Blackboard Jungle,” trying to cash in on the juvenile delinquent craze of the day with John Cassavetes making his inauspicious screen debut as an angry, alienated teen. Considering its over-the-top melodramatics and a Hollywood ending that can be seen 10 slum blocks away, it’s surprising that it was written by Reginald Rose (“12 Angry Men”) and directed by Don Siegel (“Dirty Harry,” “The Shootist”), whose other works were usually top-shelf.

Phil Karlson’s “The Fenix City Story” (1955), a fact-based tale of corruption and murder in small-town Alabama, plays out like a lurid (for its time) semidocumentary, with real Southern citizens giving gawdawful performances alongside a respectable professional cast including John McIntire, Richard Kiley and Edward Andrews, who try but fail to elevate the quality of this forgettable, preachy programmer.

And Vincent Sherman’s “Backfire” (1950) is an aptly-titled  dud with miscast Gordon MacRae as a man desperate to prove his pal (Edmond O’Brien) is innocent of murder.

Edward Dymytryk’s “Cornered” (1945) is a little more like it, containing the requisite gray areas of the genre as the director is re-teamed with “Murder, My Sweet” star Dick Powell as an ex-RCAF pilot stalking a Nazi collaborator who murdered the flyer’s wife. And Anthony Mann’s “Desperate” (1947) is a satisfyingly atmospheric story of an innocent truck driver (Steve Brodie) and his pregnant wife (Audrey Long) running from the law and the thugs who duped him into aiding in a warehouse heist. A scene-chewing Raymond Burr is great as the bug-eyed chief bad guy.

Susan Hayward shines as a dime-a-dancer helping an innocent sailor (Bill Williams) accused of murder in Harold Clurman’s “Deadline at Dawn” (1946).  The always dependable William Talman is believably bad to the bone in Richard Fleischer’s “Armored Car Robbery” (1950). And finally, true noir closes in when an escaped mental patient (a superb Marshall Thompson) takes a group of barroom customers and employees hostage in Gerald Mayer’s taut character study, “Dial 1119 (1950). I guess six keepers out of eight isn’t bad, but don’t expect as good a score from Vol. 6.

— Gene Triplett

Somewhere near the intersection of vandalism and pop art, and following sign posts that mark encounters with high art and hoax, graffiti and street culture, underground celebrity and sell-out commercialism, stands the mind-bending documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”

It’s a rigorously subversive bit of guerrilla filmmaking that’s utterly befitting of its subject and its de facto maker, the shadowy and elusive British street artist known as Banksy. Having gained international renown, or infamy, for showing up unannounced in exotic locales and surreptitiously creating elaborate art installations (not mere graffiti!) in public spaces, Banksy has raised the status of art made outside the confines of traditional circles to, well, a high art.

The urban legend that has grown up around Banksy has attracted many counterculture admirers, not the least fervid being Los Angeles retailer and French expat Thierry Guetta. He’s a compulsive videographer who, upon learning that his cousin was an infamous street artist known for his tiled mosaic Space Invader installations, began bird-dogging various graffiti paint slingers and videotaping their working processes.

Guetta’s fanatical chronicling over eight years leads him to seek out and film such outlaw artists as Shepard Fairey (creator of the iconic Obama poster image) and mysterious guys with names like Buff Monster and Neck Face.

After a few futile attempts to hook up with Banksy, who obsessively guards his true identity with a seasoned spy’s network of intricate dodges, Guetta’s persistence finally pays off in 2006. That’s when Banksy shows up in L.A., apparently aware of Guetta’s bank of raw video footage, and the two meet.

As Guetta leaps at the chance to assist Banksy and as Banksy urges Guetta to deliver on his long-standing oath to produce a documentary on the burgeoning underworld of serious graffiti artists, the film takes a bizarre and disorienting turn.

Guetta’s first clumsy effort to make a 90-minute documentary from his footage proves virtually unwatchable and leads Banksy to tag him as “someone with mental problems and a camera.” So, slyly, Banksy turns the tables on Guetta, taking on the role of director and setting up his talent-challenged protégé as the street artist Mr. Brainwash.

The result is patchwork that blends Guetta’s rough, unsteady footage of working artists with Banksy’s more rigorous, sophisticated viewpoint on artistic process. It’s all craftily narrated by actor Rhys Ifans (late of “Greenburg”), featuring interviews with Guetta and Banksy himself (his face scrupulously hidden under a hooded sweatshirt).

In its rambling, sleight-of-hand style and mock-serious tone, Banksy’s film brilliantly if briefly touches on issues of artistic authenticity, on what makes an artist great and not just a well-intentioned poseur, on the intricacies of creativity, on the nature of celebrity and unhealthy fanaticism and on the commercialization of art.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” (the title is a spoof on the commodifcation of art through exhibits and sales), which some skeptics suggest is one big prank, might just be Banksy’s idea of having one over on self-serious art collectors and stuffy academics. Maybe, but if art’s intent is to provoke then Banksy certainly is a master at that. Artist, prankster or brand name? Whatever Banksy is, he’s definitely fascinating and entertaining.

- Dennis King

“Exit Through the Gift Shop”

Not rated
1:27
3.5 stars
(Ratings criteria: sensuality and violence, etc.)