Gomorrah is brutal. That much goes without saying, given the genre. But unlike the more glamorous American gangster movies, which tend to elevate their anti-heroes to aspirational role models, Gomorrah turns that brutality against its subject — the widespread operations of Italy’s Camorrah clan. Like the bestselling exposé that inspired it, Gomorrah is more outraged than impressed by the corrupt world it reveals. To that end, director Matteo Garrone cast coarse, physically revolting adults and shot the film in an almost nauseating handheld style, fleshing out the authentic hell-on-earth locations with the sound of screams and harsh urban noise.

These are not characters or situations anyone would want to emulate, which was important to the director and his team. “Here in the south of Italy, we are living so close to this problem that we have to consider what kind of example a movie can have, especially on young people,” says Maurizio Braucci, who collaborated with Garrone, Roberto Saviano (author of the nonfiction bestseller on which Gomorrah is based) and three other writers. In his book, Saviano is openly critical of Hollywood’s impact on these criminals. He describes one boss who ordered a villa custom-built to the specifications of Tony Montana’s mansion in Scarface, then goes on to explain how The Godfather dictated their fashion sense (pinstriped suits and dark glasses) and Pulp Fiction made them sloppy (by holding their guns sideways, young killers sacrificed aim for style, making executions needlessly bloody and painful).

“I think the problem is that audiences are generally attracted by stories about the obscure part of life,” says Braucci (the English speaker of the bunch). “Gomorrah tries to give a different representation of this world, including such a terrible representation of the criminals – their bodies, the way they walk, the way they talk — that they seem almost like monsters.” Like Saviano (who had to go under police protection a couple weeks into the screenwriting process), Braucci hails from the Camorrah-controlled Naples area, bringing his own research and experience to the adaptation.

The book itself is an overwhelming litany of crime, murder and corruption, full of violent incidents but lacking in strong central characters or an organized dramatic structure. Much of the screenwriters’ work focused on refining Saviano’s sprawling exposé to half a dozen representative stories — a tailor who upsets the clan by assisting a rival Chinese outfit, a sanitation executive who hires children to illegally dump toxic waste, two drug-dealing teens (and Scarface fans) who conspire to usurp their bosses’ business — and establishing the psychology of those involved.

“The movie was shot inside the territory of the Camorrah where these things happened,” Braucci explains. The run-down apartment building where much of the action takes place, including the dramatic execution of a woman in broad daylight, would normally be off-limits to outsiders, but Braucci had earned something of an all-access pass thanks to his work with a community theater project. To help disguise their true agenda, he says, “we called the movie ‘Six Short Stories’ because we were afraid the Camorrah would have a problem if they saw the title Gomorrah.”

Though the subject matter can’t help but evoke the work of such Italian-American directors as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, Garrone’s true inspiration was his country’s rugged neorealist tradition. The actors may look like nonprofessionals, but most came from theater programs, carefully chosen for their faces — angelic, in the case of the kids (many of whom were cast from Braucci’s workshop), harsh and unpleasant for the older characters who exploit them. Some of the performers even had criminal connections: One actor had spent 10 years in jail, where he first studied theater, and three others were arrested after the film.

The film is light on exposition and context, thrusting the audience directly into its (under)world and expecting them to read important backstory into the actors’ physical appearances. The action often feels raw and immediate enough that many audiences have mistaken the film for a documentary. “But you would not be able to watch a murder or a drug sale in a documentary, so Gomorrah is a fake documentary,” Braucci explains.

Still, Garrone embraced improvisation and happy accidents, allowing the unpredictable to enrich the film’s sense of reality (another reason he kept Braucci on hand during production — so he could assist with frequent on-set rewrites). During the film’s most iconic scene, in which two Hollywood-obsessed teens stripped to their skivvies fire machine guns into the sea, a pyrotechnic glitch heightened the actors’ reactions: Both characters were supposed to shoot the boat before it exploded, but the blast came early. “If you watch the actor, you can see the expression on his face was real surprise,” Braucci says.

Without turning the narrative into a heavy-handed morality tale, Garrone and his team see to it that consequences eventually catch up with characters. In the world of the Camorrah, no one can outrun his fate, and when executions do happen, the victims aren’t canonized in the operatic fashion of Scarface, but rather treated like so much garbage in need of disposing. “This is the first big movie about the Camorrah in Italy,” Braucci says. “It’s like a dark fable about how innocence and youth are destroyed by this dehumanizing process of modernity. In this case, criminal organizations are the source of this destructive energy, but it is a metaphor for any part of this world that is under the oppression of the dark or evil.”

Gomorrrah, currently in theaters in New York and LA, premieres on VOD today. Its theatrical release expands later this month.

Critics had every reason to object when Billy Bob Thornton remade The Bad News Bears a few years back. After all, Walter Matthau had already defined the role of foul-mouthed Coach Buttermaker, a cranky alcoholic who oversees a team of misfit little leaguers, in the perfectly serviceable 1976 original. Now we get yet another variation on the formula, this time starring Sam Rockwell as the last man you’d want coaching a varsity girls basketball team, in The Winning Season.

Strange that this second film from Grace Is Gone writer-director James C. Strouse could be so different from his debut (in which John Cusack played an emasculated widower who refuses to cope with the death of his wife in Iraq), and yet so similar to an entire subcategory of the underdog sports comedy. Some would argue that the girls basketball angle sets The Winning Season apart, but what little originality the film has going for it is the element it shares with the largely unseen (and widely unloved) Grace Is Gone –– namely, its observant yet underplayed attention to a fragile father figure.

Rockwell’s Bill is burnt-out by past disappointments, gets one day of custody with his daughter a week (she plays for a rival team, which makes for a particularly awkward scenario, when he coaches his girls on how to exploit her weakness) and reeks of alcohol without resorting to the usual device of showing him chugging a beer at all times. It’s convenient that Strouse has chosen a familiar enough genre that he can shorthand the exposition, which compliments the way he and his cast define character –– more through nuance and gestures than on-the-nose dialogue.

That’s not to say that Strouse doesn’t get off on writing hilariously inappropriate dialogue for Coach Bill to say within earshot of his team’s tender ears (when one of his more precocious players comes on to him, he says, “You’re not my type. I like bit tits and onion butts … It’s an ass that brings tears to your eyes.” But the most telling character moments are delivered between lines, such as a scene in which Bill bluffs about walking out on the girls if they don’t like his coaching style, then nervously waits in the hallway for someone to come out and fetch him. His insecure fidgeting, unsure whether the ploy will work, reinforces the idea that he really has no clue how to communicate with young women.

“I didn’t expect the other teams would be so much better. I thought everyone would kind of suck,” Bill tells them, with his usual insensitivity. After one particularly crushing defeat, it takes a hint from their lesbian bus driver Donna (Margo Martindale, bringing subtlety to another potential cliche) to cheer up the dejected team. She’s not only the good cop to his bad-boy routine, but an emotionally intuitive go-between capable of translating the girls’ needs back into terms he can understand. Their turnaround from four straight losses to a series of wins is unlikely to say the least (though, it should be said, no more so than believing Zac Efron as the Wildcats’ star player in High School Musical). With only six players, one of them on crutches, the lady Chargers need more than just a little tough love.

The advantage of having such a small team is that Strouse can give each of the girls more than just a single, superficial character trait. Plus, he’s got a great cast to work with, including Half Nelson’s Shareeka Epps, Quinceanera’s Emily Rios and rising star Emma Roberts. That should certainly help make The Winning Season commercial, which seems to be the consensus about those films acquired at Sundance this year (sure-thing success over risky, but high-quality pick-ups), though the film is atypically uninterested in whether or not the girls win their final game. At that point, what matters is how Bill, who’s forced off the team after being arrested for drunk driving, can manage to be a part of their moment of glory –– a situation that mirrors the jeopardized relationship with his own daughter. It’s a testament to Strouse and Rockwell’s talents that they can have us rooting for this deadbeat dad throughout, and yet so much of The Winning Season is safe-bet storytelling or the polishing of recycled parts, one hopes that the failure of Grace Is Gone hasn’t scared Strouse away from making more original and ambitious films in the future.

This year’s Sundance featured firsthand accounts of human rights violations in Darfur (Reporter), Tibet (Tibet in Song) and Burma (Burma VJ), so what does it say about me that the documentary that reduced me to a burbling mess was The Cove, a white-knuckle critique of dolphin killing in Japan? The truth is, it may actually reveal less about me than it does the tactics by which the films position their respective causes for audiences — one of the many subjects director Eric Daniel Metzgar contemplates with Reporter.

In his philosophically introspective doc, Metzgar accompanies New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof on his ventures through Africa, deconstructing the methods he uses to convey the atrocities he witnesses there back to his readers in the West (a heavy burden, considering that his writing has the power — or the potential, at least — to influence world leaders). It was Kristof, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who helped alert the world to the fact that there was a genocide occurring in Darfur.

Metzgar approaches Kristof’s reporting with a healthy skepticism, just as all moviegoers would be advised to handle agenda-driven docs (he explains why victims can be unreliable, causes can obscure logical reasoning and so on). Incorporating himself in the process from the very beginning, Metzgar quotes Kristof’s mission as “to make you care about what’s just over the hill,” raising red flags as the journalist seeks out worst-case atrocities to write about everywhere he goes. In a Congolese camp, Kristof passes over horror stories deemed not depressing enough before training his attention on a withered 41-year-old woman, Yohanita, who was raped by soldiers, saw her fields pillaged and now teeters on the brink of death.

Experience (and a professional interest in research on the psychology of compassion) has taught Kristof that these individual-focused stories are the ones that connect with readers. Citing studies by professor Paul Slovic, Reporter addresses the concept of “psychic numbing,” a notion used to explain the way humans are hard-wired to emotionally reject situations in which large groups of people are threatened by violence, disease or starvation. According to one of Slovic’s experiments, “feelings begin to wane when the number of sufferers reaches just two” (Kristof elaborates on the idea in his column “Save the Darfur Puppy,” only half-sarcastically suggesting that news organizations might be more inclined to engage the subject if presented with images of “a soulful dog in peril,” rather than suffering human beings).

Extrapolating these theories back out to the other films, we find incredibly different tactics in practice. In Tibet in Song, for instance, musicologist Ngawang Choephel (himself a Tibetan refugee) attempts to document his cultural heritage during a risky return trip to his native country. Choephel is not a natural filmmaker, though he’s a uniquely qualified person to make such a documentary, since he was arrested and sentenced to 18 years in prison for performing these lost songs in public. In much the same way Kristof exploits his subjects, journalists the world over fixated on Choephel’s situation and used his case to appeal for intervention — he became the individual through which outsiders could be made to understand the crisis posed by Chinese occupation of Tibet. And yet, in his own film, Choephel downplays his personal story, focusing instead on the traditional Tibetan culture (in this case, music) at risk of being extinguished by these external controlling forces. Yes, protesters are being executed and jailed, but an entire way of life is also at risk, and Choephel wagers that this angle will inspire action.

Director Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ sets scenes of uprising eerily similar to B-roll featured in Tibet in Song within the context of the thriller-like story of the Democratic Voice of Burma, a concerned-citizens group committed to (illegally) exposing the country’s police-state conditions. To support his high-concept hook, Østergaard intercuts first-hand footage shot amid marches (which devolve into Kent State-style melees, with armed soldiers beating and executing protesters in plain view) with reenacted scenes of “Joshua,” a DVB leader who helped relay this evidence to supporters on the outside. Here is a case in which a filmmaker spotlights an individual for inspirational rather than sympathetic aims, but Burma VJ’s genre-driven narrative approach confuses where concerned audiences should direct their attention: Do we cheer for these heroic resistance fighters or attempt to support the Buddhist monks and ordinary citizens impacted most by these inexcusable conditions?

And then there’s Flipper. The main character of The Cove is charismatic activist Richard O’Barry, who trained the famous TV dolphin and has since dedicated his life to liberating all dolphins held in captivity. Conceptually not so different from Burma VJ, The Cove details a James Bond-like operation by which O’Barry and a number of accomplices (professional divers, ILM special effects crews and other supportive adventure seekers) plan to infiltrate an off-limits cove in Taiji, Japan, where fishermen kill thousands of dolphins each year. O’Barry is sure that if he can only get footage of the atrocity, then dolphin lovers of the world will be inspired to stop the practice. So why is The Cove so much more effective than these other films? Is dolphin slaughter (for those few Japanese who value the meat, despite its toxically high mercury levels) so different from the killing of fish or cattle for human consumption?

O’Barry tells the story of how Kathy, one of the dolphins who played Flipper on TV, died in his arms (dolphins, unlike humans, are not automatic air breathers, and O’Barry believes Kathy was so depressed she ended her life simply by choosing not to take her next breath). He feels personally responsible for the world’s fascination with dolphins — if it weren’t for the show, Sea World-style parks and swim-with-dolphins programs that keep the animals in captivity would not enjoy their current level of popularity. After dolphins are driven toward the Taiji beaches and trapped, trainers come and pick out the lucky few who will be spared (though kept in captivity — a stress-filled but considerably less grisly fate). The rest are redirected to the cove, where they are speared to death out of sight.

Surely there are psychological reasons that The Cove’s climax is so devastating, but it would be unfair to say this is simply another case of “Darfur puppy” persuasion. It could be that as educated, concerned Westerners, we’re already familiar with (and possibly psychically numb to) the atrocities in Darfur, Tibet and Burma, whereas this exposé of dolphin farming packs the element of surprise. But it’s also great filmmaking. Director Louie Psyihoyos (who, like Metzgar and Choephel, includes himself in the documentary) establishes a strong rhetorical argument on behalf of dolphin protection. “The dolphin’s smile is nature’s greatest deception. It creates the illusion that they’re always happy,” O’Barry pronounces in his characteristically overstated style, and yet the movie convincingly argues that dolphins may actually be world’s most intelligent animals. (Old Partner, another Sundance doc, shows how an old Korean owes his livelihood to his 40-year-old ox, but that’s not nearly as dramatic as the story told by one surfer who was saved from a shark attack by a dolphin intervention.)

So, when The Cove eventually unveils the footage of the sea run red with blood (a literal crimson tide, seeping out into view of a public stretch of road) and the actual killing of these creatures, we can’t help but be affected. Reporter’s Metzgar seems to buy Slovic and Kristof’s view that humans have been evolutionarily coded to withstand scenes of mass atrocity, but how do you explain the way other films, such as 2005 Sundance audience award winner Shake Hands With the Devil, devastated us with scenes of Tutsis being butchered in the streets by Rwandan Hutus? But Kristof wants more than to depress us. His aim is for us to engage and actually become involved. Will individual-focused horror stories do that more persuasively than accounts of widespread violence? Will cute animals in peril prove more compelling than human examples? The answers are largely philosophical, but Reporter differs from other heal-the-world docs in that it actually thinks to ask the questions.

Have we got a pair of slumdog millionaires for you! In Rudo y Cursi, Y tu mamá también co-stars Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal reunite as two hardscrabble soccer fans whisked from the drudgery of small-town banana picking for a shot at the big time. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s kid brother Carlos Cuarón, the movie shares many of the charms of that earlier collaboration (Carlos co-wrote Y tu mamá, as well as Alfonso’s Sólo con tu pareja) but suggests a very different dynamic between the two characters.

This time, Luna and Bernal play half-brothers, named Beto and Tato, mutually loyal to their common mother and, to a lesser degree, one another. When they aren’t toiling away in the fields, they spend most of their time on the soccer field. Beto plays goalie, aggressive enough in his manner that his teammates call him “Rudo” (or “rough”), while Tato is such a show-offy forward, his fancy tricks earn him the nickname “Cursi” (“prissy,” in English) — monikers that confuse the fact that each is simultaneously macho and sensitive.

They’re both dreamers, but unrealistic enough about how to pursue their dreams that they hardly know how to handle opportunity when they bump into a talent scout on their way to a match. Instead of talking soccer, Tato tries to impress the out-of-towner with his less-than-impressive singing skills. A compulsive gambler, Beto sees this as his big chance, overlooking the fact that his wife and kids don’t necessarily fit into his fantasy of fame. Fortunately for them, the scout admires both brothers’ skill, but there is a catch: He can only take one to Mexico City to play — and so the rivalry begins.

Actually, Carlos Cuarón makes it clear that a form of healthy competition has always existed between the siblings, as suggested by the art form to which the pair have raised insults and squabbling. In selling their unique connection, it helps that Luna and Bernal have a preexisting bond, though it’s that same keen observation of human nature and keen attention to character that the writer brought to Y tu mamá también that makes their fraternal dynamic so convincing.

As he proved in that earlier project, Carlos Cuarón has a beautiful gift for boiling a vivid and complex world down to the life experience of a couple characters. Rudo y Cursi may not aspire to the sheer existential heft of Y tu mamá, but it manages to offer a near-epic sense of Mexican culture and society by making intimate company with two compelling characters. As soon as he signs with a pro team, the lucky brother is successful enough that the scout returns to recruit the other, and before long, they’re playing against one another while living together in the same mansion. Money comes easy (a dangerous temptation for Beto’s gambling habit), as do women (Tato falls head-first for a social-climbing television star), and it’s impossible to resist the infectious energy of their success.

At this point, an American movie would do one of two things: The momentum would build to a climactic game, in which these underdogs manage to overcome the odds once and for all, or the cautionary tale would kick in and the movie would remind us that nothing in life is that easy. But Rudo y Cursi owes nothing to Hollywood storytelling, adhering instead to a wildly manic below-the-border sensibility in which fate doesn’t follow Syd Field rules and chance can be truly unpredictable.

Like a Gabriel García Márquez novel, Rudo y Cursi sports a sense of humor about life’s humiliations (using the jaded talent scout as his narrator, Cuarón expects us to laugh off such incidents as Tato’s hazing, when his teammates cheerily gang-rape him in the shower) and a generosity toward the “undeserving” (banana pickers and drug dealers alike deserve a shot in his nonjudgmental worldview).  And just as Y tu mamá también refused to sentimentalize sexuality, this story shows that life may can deliver unimaginable satisfaction and disappointment within the span of a few minutes. As the debut release for Mexican super-threesome Alfonso Cuarón, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Guillermo del Toro’s new Cha Cha Chá shingle, Rudo y Cursi marks a great first project: Its nationality is stamped in its very DNA, and yet the film’s appeal is truly universal.

The advantage of seeing the Ashton Kutcher-starring Spread at Sundance, as opposed to in theaters down the road, isn’t just the fact that director David Mackenzie hasn’t yet been forced to neuter the film’s skintastic sex scenes (his 2003 Young Adam was shaved down for far less to get an R rating here in the States), but also the way it so nicely compliments a film that screened a few days later, Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience. Neither movie quite works on its own, but as a pair, they are the yin to one another’s yang — portraits of a Hollywood hustler and high-class escort that, taken together, give a well-rounded picture of that world.

That’s the beauty of film festivals: Cramming thirty-odd films into a week’s time has a way of illuminating thematic connections between stories you’d almost certainly miss when screening them months apart at the megaplex. Autism, genocide, un-reciprocated love, sex-for-pay — all big themes at this year’s Sundance. And while neither Spread nor The Girlfriend Experience has much to say about those first few categories, they prove plenty revealing when it comes to understanding the realm of sex work.

“I don’t want to be arrogant, but I’m a very attractive man. I can’t help it, I just am,” says Ashton Kutcher, giving us his very best Batman voice as he delivers Spread’s husky opening narration. “Nicki” goes on explain how easily he can seduce some middle-aged woman into putting a roof over his head and designer clothes on his back, while Anne Heche takes the bait before our eyes. He’s just the accessory her otherwise perfect Hollywood Hills house needs, and she … well, she’s his meal ticket.

This is not the L.A. most Angelenos know, but some sort of fantasy version of it, the sort you might encounter in a Bret Easton Ellis novel or those Armani ads in which stylish ladies lounge among naked male models. When they have sex, it’s porn sex — every position imaginable, perfectly lit, with Heche crying out in “I’ve never had it this good” ecstasy. These montages might be laughable if they weren’t so frickin’ hot, and it’s not until Nicki’s inevitable turn for the worse that we find time to address important questions. Like, how is it that Kutcher can have no ass in jeans, and yet it can look so good scooching across the dining room table? (Heche, too, has never looked so scorching.)

Hollywood hates it when characters succeed without earning it, so it’s no surprise that Nicki’s free ride must eventually end. But even here, real-world rules do not apply — nor do the conventions of Hollywood Icarus stories, for that matter. If this were Midnight Cowboy, he’d be blowing Bob Balaban in a bathroom, but Spread seems to be a first among hustler movies in that it doesn’t equate turning a male trick with rock bottom. Nicki’s exploits are strictly straight, and the karmic lesson the film has in mind involves watching this cool-hearted narcissist fall for a woman he can’t actually have, played by Adventureland’s Margarita Levieva.

Spread is the very definition of a vanity project, one that allows Kutcher to demonstrate his acting chops and his chiseled abs at the same time (that cocky self-confidence is just a shield for the vulnerable child within, you see). Yet despite all its superficial pleasures, Spread never really reveals that inner soul. That’s what The Girlfriend Experience is for — sort of. Casting porn star Sasha Grey as a high-priced hooker, Soderbergh leaves the sex stuff out and focuses on the logistics of her world, from the business of improving her standing within that arena to maintaining a committed relationship. At the risk of sounding prurient, a little sex would have gone a long way in this film, which adheres to the prismatic editing style of Soderbergh’s more experimental projects but goes a good 40 minutes without giving us something to latch on to.

And though Grey is just a notch above Paris Hilton in the acting department, her thespian shortcomings actually serve to reinforce the enigma of her persona, as she keeps her true self hidden from clients and the audience alike. What matters is that Soderbergh seems interested in exploring the identity behind that façade — unlike Mackenzie, who celebrates the superficiality of Spread. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, by the way. Speaking in purely technical terms, The Girlfriend Experience is something of a mess (granted, it was a work-in-progress that screened at Sundance), and Spread is remarkably well constructed.

People may object to the shallowness of Mackenzie’s film, but it’s hard to fault the execution, which wraps with a poetic image: (spoiler alert) After returning to Heche’s house, this time as a delivery boy, Kutcher walks down the driveway as the electric gate swings closed behind him, shutting him out of that glamorous life. It’s an elegant metaphor, but not quite the end. Mackenzie has one more shot up his sleeve. This one we won’t spoil, except to say it expands the allegory well beyond Nicki’s situation to comment on L.A. at large — and for once, sex has nothing to do with it.

Move over Milk. I Love You Phillip Morris does the gay rights movement one better, using in-your-face comedy and mainstream casting to defuse whatever anxiety the Heartland might have with guy-guy relationships — the irony being that this outrageous conman comedy from Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa was originally supposed to be directed by none other than Gus Van Sant. When Van Sant dropped out, the writers stepped in to shoot their own screenplay, resulting in a first-time film that feels more polished and professional than 90% of the studio comedies in theaters these days.

It helps that Ficarra and Requa went in with a proper script, an ingredient too frequently missing in Judd Apatow and Adam McKay’s improv-happy method, where a cocktail napkin sketch of a plot seems to be all the team needs. No doubt Ficarra and Requa allowed their leads, Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, a certain flexibility in interpreting their parts, but it’s refreshing to find a comedy that cuts together, where one scene sets up the next and ideas planted early in the film pay off for bigger laughs later on. The final gag, which shows an unmistakably phallic-shaped cloud, completes a joke set up in first-act flashbacks to Steven Jay Russell’s childhood.

Who is this Russell fella? He’s a Virginia/Florida/Texas con-man who, over the course of the movie, works as a cop for a few years, has a daughter by a good Christian woman, gets mixed up with the law, goes to jail and meets the love of his life, a man named Phillip Morris (yes, like the cigarettes). When Russell’s sentence ends, he poses as a lawyer and springs Morris from prison before his penchant for criminal deception lands them both in the slammer all over again. Only the most twisted comedy writers could dream up such a plot, but Ficarra and Requa didn’t have to. It all happened. Well, probably not quite like this, but something tells me the facts were probably even more outrageous.

Now, take a minute and try to imagine what Gus Van Sant would have done with the material. For the life of me, I can’t picture it. It’s all about tone, and I Love You Phillip Morris depends on the trickiest of balancing acts. Even getting a performance like this from Jim Carrey, who manages to play it along the lines of his Man on the Moon Andy Kaufman persona (cocky, charming, a little crazy, but free from the bug-eyed bellowing and sad-clown shtick that sometimes creeps into the actor’s bipolar acting history). It sets up a world in which a well-adjusted family man can be seen tucking his daughter into bed or patiently praying with his wife one minute, then going doggy-style on some dude in a hotel room the next, with nothing more than a voice-overed “Did I forget to mention I’m gay?” to help audiences cope with the record-screech revelation.

Everything hinges on that moment. Ficarra and Requa could’ve introduced the idea in a million ways — with Russell cruising someone in the produce department or tapping his feet in an airport bathroom — but they go all the way, with a burly trucker type screaming “Do it, come in my ass!”, and Carrey obliging. Progressive and/or desensitized viewers will surely hate the scene, wishing for a little subtlety, but in this day and age, the only way to sell a gay sex scene is through comedy, and the I Love You Phillip Morris team isn’t content to settle for some respectable rutting (a la Brokeback Mountain) or tasteful displays of public affection (the way Milk does it, downplaying the “sexuality” in “homosexuality”). Russell probably didn’t have the kind of sex this scene implies –– nor do most gay men –– but by cutting straight to the extreme, Ficarra and Requa inoculate the squeamish.

After all, being offensive is easy (catch any episode of Family Guy, and you’ll witness “how far can we go?” humor in practice), but it takes a special gift to be as strategic about button-pushing as I Love You Phillip Morris is. Take an off-hand scene in which Russell begins his first day on a new job (he’s conned his way in to a CFO position with a major financial company) and he asks his black assistant for coffee: “I’ll do that today,” the poised young lady replies, “but I don’t do that really.” With that fleeting exchange, the screenwriters widen the net, playing once again on the characters’ and audiences’ stereotypes. The next time we see Russell at work, he has a new assistant, this time a flaming gay man, because the world is backwards, and progress doesn’t happen overnight.

For most of the movie, Russell’s homosexuality is just one more trait in the character’s quiver, which is the kind of ideal depiction GLAAD is always going on about, but I Love You Phillip Morris is actually stronger when the movie is making a big deal of the relationship. Who can possibly resist the stretch in which Russell falls for McGregor’s wide-eyed Southern boy in prison? But as soon as they’re both on the outside, the focus shifts to a more straightforward con-man movie — still twice as entertaining as Catch Me If You Can (not to mention such superficially similar Carrey comedies as Liar Liar), and yet a little light on the relationship plot that planted the audience’s butts in the seats in the first place.

“Is the gay thing and stealing something that goes hand in hand?” Leslie Mann (playing Russell’s religious wife) asks early on, perfectly summing up the perception the movie hopes to correct. It’s not easy to get audiences to root for a gay relationship involving a character they otherwise disapprove of, but I Love You Phillip Morris pulls it off, not by offending everyone in sight (the prevailing tactic in un-P.C. comedies), but by showing it’s OK to laugh at such things.

There are capital-G Guys, and then there is Greg Mottola, whose semi-autobiographical “how I spent my summer vacation” comedy Adventureland insists that back in his college days, the young director was more sensitive than all those other dudes who just wanted to get laid. That would be fine and all if the big payoff the movie works toward was something other than a scene in which Mottola’s fictional stand-in (played by The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg) gets to ball the girl of his dreams (Kristen Stewart, operating on the other end of the chastity spectrum from her Twilight character). I mean, he’s not that special: The world is full of late-blooming virgins with the romantic notion that two people should really love each other before they have sex (Mottola already dealt with that idea quite nicely when Michael Cera’s character passes up his first time in Superbad).

More interesting than the movie’s paint-by-numbers relationship plot is the environment in which it all goes down. Coming home from his senior year in college, James Brennan learns that his dad has been demoted at work, meaning his family can’t afford to send him to Europe for the summer as planned. Instead, he’s stuck in Pittsburgh with a plastic bag full of joints and the terrifying realization that his college degree is good for nothing more than a shit job at the local amusement park.

A place like Adventureland would make the perfect stage for a Larry Clark-style look at adolescence: In theory, such venues offer a delicious contrast between the fun, clean-scrubbed surface they represent to kids and all the transgressive behavior that goes on between the hormone-addled employees, as they get high on their cigarette breaks, land their first VD from the girl who runs the Ferris wheel or what have you. But Mottola has a far tamer view of the park. Considering that he really held such a job, you’d hope for more insider insights than the fact that the concessions have sometimes passed their expiration date and the games are rigged so no one can win a “giant-ass panda bear” (among comedies, only Waiting has really nailed the borderline-depraved atmosphere of minimum-wage ennui).

What are the chances that James would meet his soul mate in such a place anyway? The guy’s a budding blowhard with degrees in comparative literature and Renaissance studies, for crying out loud. While his fellow Guys are fixated on Lisa P., a perfectly proportioned but vacant-minded airhead played by Margarita Levieva, James prefers Stewart’s Em. Why, it’s hard to say exactly. She’s certainly the more appealing actress, but it’s not like the characters share all that much in common, apart from a withering disdain for the world around them. What James doesn’t realize is that Em has been hooking up with resident stud Connell (Ryan Reynolds), the aloof, slightly older maintenance man who embodies the sexual self-confidence James lacks.

Adventureland will inevitably suffer comparisons to Superbad, which was spontaneous and alive in a way this follow-up merely feels scripted. Perhaps that’s because Mottola relives those 1987 summer nights with the benefit of hindsight, identifying less with the crippling insecurity James is experiencing in the moment than a more mature, big-picture view of events (things were simpler in those days, when “Rock Me Amadeus” playing one too many times over the loudspeaker was genuine cause for annoyance). It’s a noxious subgenre to the coming-of-age tale: The “do-over movie” — nostalgic films like Charlie Bartlett, where everybody says and does what the writer-director wishes had happened back in school.

Mottola is great with actors, but less gifted as a writer and sometimes downright clumsy as a director. It takes a good half hour for the film to find its rhythm, and even then, some scenes just don’t work. He’s self-deprecating enough to make the character feel real, but there’s nothing honest or particularly original about the relationship on which everything depends. In the movie, James is sore that he’s stuck working games, rather than rides. Twenty years later, it seems Mottola finally got his wish: Like one of those Adventureland roller coasters, the story sticks to the track, offering the same predictable twists and thrills we’ve experienced dozens of times before. You buy your ticket knowing what you’re in for up front. And yet, with The Daytrippers and Superbad, Mottola has given us good reason to expect a lot more.