A few weeks back, Despicable Me co-screenwriters Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul graciously sat down for a candid interview. We talked about the inspiration for the Eastern European accent affected by their leading man, Steve Carell. They addressed the challenges of devising innovative action sequences when they knew, in advance, that their animation had to be in 3-D. And they shared lessons they learned while writing Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!

I asked them if it stuck in the back of their minds that their original animated feature happened to be coming out in the same summer as a fourth Shrek and a third Toy Story.

"No, that's at the front of our minds," Daurio said with a nervous chuckle. "There's no way to say, 'Oh, two of the biggest animated franchises ever are coming out on either side of our movie. That's fine! We'll be fine!'"

The collaborators maintained a brave front because they are confident in their movie. But they were right to worry.

Despicable Me is perfectly fine by most animation standards. Carell voices Gru, an evil villain who seems to have wandered out of a '70s-era Bond movie. Gru is getting on in years, and his plans for world domination are routinely upstaged by a younger, smarter menace named Vector (Jason Segel). Gru needs one more scheme to get back in the game, so he devises a plan to steal the moon by shrinking it to the size of a silver dollar. But to complete the mission, he must adopt three adorable orphans who are in dire need of a family.

Spoofing the secret-agent genre by telling a story through the eyes of a conventional villain opens Despicable Me up to a world of options. The subtle satire gleaned from Gru's predicaments caters to adult audience members. His adorable yellow minions will entertain the film's youngest patrons. There's a memorable riff on Brian De Palma's Mission: Impossible that involves a dangling shrink ray and a killer shark. And there's a warm-hearted subplot regarding the joys of parenthood that will inspire moms and dads to clutch their cuddly kids and thank them for being around.

But Despicable Me arrives on the heels of Pixar's masterful Toy Story 3, and while I acknowledge it's unfair to compare them, the movies simply don't occupy the same playing field. Lee Unkrich's comical, tearful sequel moves its audience with a profound, multi-layered adventure aimed at the heart as well as the mind. Similarly high aspirations can't be found in Despicable Me. It sets out to entertain, and for the most part, it succeeds. Back when multiplexes were filled with the likes of Antz, Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, or the Ice Age series, that was acceptable. But the animation bar has been raised, permanently, and Despicable Me misses it by a mile.

Not really a remake in the standard sense, the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators wants to make you forget everything that's happened with this "franchise" since 1990. That's when the wayward Predator 2 brought the alien hunters to a not too distant future L.A., with very middling results. So forget Alien vs. Predator and the equally awful follow-up and prepare yourself for another Most Dangerous Game take on the material. This time around, a rag tag group of killers (both professional and "hobbyists") are whisked off to an extraterrestrial game preserve. There, they are pitted against well-armed squads of the crab-mouthed monsters in a deadly, frequently derivative, test of survival.

We first meet Special Ops mercenary Royce (Adrien Brody) as he's freefalling toward the planet's surface. Within minutes, he's hooked up with an executioner from a Mexican drug cartel (Danny Trejo), a Brazilian military ace (Alice Braga), a Russian war vet (Oleg Taktarov), a rebel soldier from Sierra Leone (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), a death row inmate (Walton Goggins), a member of the Japanese Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien) and a doctor (Topher Grace). Quickly figuring out their "kill or be killed" place on this jungle otherworld, they discover that they are not alone. Not only is there a band of space slayers out to get them, but the area has been populated with beings from other galaxies as well.

Thus we get the Predator riffs we know so well: the infrared night vision sequences; the ominous vocal clicks; the ability to mimic the environment around them; the arm blades, the shoulder lasers, and the pulse cannons. New this time around are the predator attack dogs (cool), flying surveillance devices, a long standing blood feud that finds the bigger hunters picking on the smaller, and one incredibly whacked out cameo (no - the Governator does not show up here, though his original movie mission is referenced). Had Predators done more with this, had it offered up even more novel reinterpretations of the creature and its mythology, we'd enjoy this movie a lot more. Instead, director Nimród Antal goes back to the standard action movie beats -- some down time to establish personality and exposition, and then ramp up the foot chases and jungle firefights. The results are fun if wholly formulaic.

It's sad that the man who made Vacancy and Armored doesn't have more to say. There is no vision here, no spark of imagination to get your inner geek re-invested in this series. Basically, if you loved the first film and can tolerate the Arnold-less sequel, you'll have a good time. But if you are expecting something inspired, something that takes the whole Predator experience to a whole new level (like James Cameron did when he turned Alien into Aliens), you will need to look elsewhere. What you get instead is a thoroughly professional, journeyman thriller which avoids surprises and stays well within the genre. Even the acting is nothing short of decent. Brody and crew aren't give all that much to do, and they manage such a minimized requirement quite well.

Frankly, one expects a little more from producer Rodriguez. Given the blood-splattered insanity of his Planet Terror and the astonishing optical wonders of Sin City, should we really be simply satisfied? Granted, it's Antal behind the lens, but one imagines the filmmaker functioning under the full faith and artistic credit of his overseer. Somewhere buried deep inside a scenario in which interstellar sportsman hunt humans for fun lies a really superior cinematic experience. In fact, it's already happened -- some 23 years ago. Predators had two decades to find a way to freshen up this concept. Instead, it goes back to the motion picture truisms that worked before. While not bad, it's definitely not bad ass.

A video featuring men going down on one another (in cowboy costumes, no less) that a suburban couple breaks out when they decide to fool around is undoubtedly the most "gay" thing about The Kids Are All Right, Lisa Cholodenko's terrifically entertaining and moving fourth feature. The fact that the couple in question is comprised of two women, one a serious-minded doctor and the other a scatterbrained job-hopper, factors in only as much as your definition of "liberal" and "conservative" limits your views on family dynamics and, indeed, concepts of right and wrong.

But as the title suggests, the film begins and ends with the two children Dr. Nic (Annette Bening) and earth-mother Jules (Julianne Moore) conceived through an anonymous sperm donor. Both Joni (Mia Wasakowski, much stronger here than in the languid Alice in Wonderland), mere weeks away from collegiate bliss, and Laser (a very good Josh Hutcherson), a pensive jock, come from the same donor but only Laser has the itch to meet the man, evident in a scene where he joyfully watches his borderline-psychotic best friend (Eddie Hassell) literally wrestle with his father. Fulfilling her sisterly obligations while keeping the "moms" in the dark, Joni is the one who first contacts their absentee donor, a restaurateur and organic farmer named Paul, played with reliable intelligence and swagger by Mark Ruffalo.

Unexpectedly, it's Joni who takes to Paul right away, while Laser gets rustled and mildly insulted by his ambivalence to sports; the denim-adorned donor is seemingly too busy putting it to his gorgeous hostess and flirting with a dread-locked hippie at his farm to throw around the ball. Whereas Paul is overwhelmed with his lover man persona, Laser lets their meeting slip while being passive-aggressively grilled over his possible homosexuality by the moms. Hesitant as always, Nic allows the motorcycle-driving Lothario into their house for wine and a barbecue before Paul impulsively hires Jules to redecorate his "fecund" backyard. A shot of Paul hypnotized by Jules' thong as she works and her rousing reaction to a slice of his strawberry-rhubarb pie points to the stormy weather ahead.    

Cholodenko has gone from treating the LGBT community as a seductive society, as she did in her superb debut, High Art, to portraying a singular homosexual couple as, well, suburban. The casting of Moore and Bening, both spectacular and wildly funny, and the film's pedestrian structure could have been shallow attempts at commercial acceptance, but this actually constitutes a risky maneuver on the director's part, one that pays off immensely. The politics and sexuality of The Kids Are All Right are covertly complex or, perhaps more pointedly, so natural that they defy mapping. Either way, they are embedded in the characters rather than guiding them, something that many films strictly about homosexuals have been unable to fathom.

Don't be mistaken: The Kids Are All Right certainly comes from a liberal state of mind but it never belittles or condescends to conservatives, nor does it bark its opinion like so many films of its ilk have in the past. Here, Cholodenko, who co-wrote the script with Stuart Blumberg and who herself gave birth to a boy with the help of an anonymous sperm donor, enters a similar class of filmmaker as Alexander Payne in her handling of serious comedies grounded by complexly drawn characters and urgent social issues. Sideways, it is not, but The Kids Are All Right is, in a particularly dull summer at the movies, a friendly reminder that there are...alternatives.   

The phrase "YouTube sensation" gets thrown around an awful lot, describing every popular online video from lip-synching loonies to adolescents on Novocaine. But Jack Rebney is the real deal. Who's Jack Rebney? That's a good question, one that filmmaker Ben Steinbauer felt destined to answer in his search for the guy who became known as Winnebago Man. The result of Steinbauer's three-year journey is knee-slapping fun, a relentlessly entertaining documentary about fame and the unlikely famous. And the art of cursing. 

Jack Rebney didn't start in the limelight: In the late 1980s, he was just a guy starring in a corporate sales video for the Winnebago RV company. Innocent enough, sure, until you see Rebney's outtakes, in which he regularly spews a slurry of profanity so raw, so ridiculous, so harmlessly angry, you can only laugh at the performance.

Somehow, Rebney's bloopers and blunders were put onto a VHS tape, copied onto many other tapes, and distributed throughout the entertainment industry. They eventually stormed the world on YouTube some 20 years after the Winnebago Man first filled the frame with filth.

Lucky for us, Steinbauer wants to know everything about this lightning strike of popularity, and wants to share it with us, the right approach for a culture now supersaturated with the very idea of sharing information. After the quiet director breaks down the particulars of how and why the outtakes spread like wildfire, he is practically obsessed (or, he appears obsessed) with finding Rebney. Questions abound. Does Rebney know of his fame? Has he ever watched YouTube? Is he still really pissed off?

Steinbauer and company make sure we get plenty of Rebney's rants right up front; when the filmmaker actually finds the guy, the thrill is a bit intoxicating, like finally meeting a famous actor and wondering about his "real" persona. When he shows up on screen, Rebney is in his 70s, crotchety yet charming, and sly enough to continually keep us guessing about the real Jack Rebney. He's a character with character.

And that's where Winnebago Man turns from a simple idea into a complex look at cultural iconography and public perception. Rebney's initial fame -- or infamy, if you will -- is as viral as it gets, a pristine example of the retweet, long before there was a Twitter. But when Rebney starts showing up at public screenings of his videos, revving up the cult crowd, fame takes a very revealing turn.(Think Troll 2's popularity, as seen in Best Worst Movie).

Intended or not, Steinbauer creates an enlightening case study about the zeitgeist, and how cool becomes cool. And even if Winnebago Man didn't peer deeply into the eyes of popular culture, it works simply by recognizing how exciting it can be to see a frustrated guy curse his brains out.