Here’s a line that I’m willing to bet has never been used before in a movie—that may in fact never have been uttered by any human being in history: “You used my leg for a tampon!” If it is ever spoken again, it will certainly be by someone quoting Superbad, a movie that could make Quentin Tarantino blush. It was written by Seth Rogan, who, as a collaborator on The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up, has raised the bar for floridly obscene guy-alogue to previously undreamt of levels. (Whether those levels be heights or depths is another argument.) Rogan and his writing partner Evan Goldberg began their script a decade ago when they were both 14-year-olds, and whatever polish it may have received since then has done nothing to mitigate the unstoppable obsession with sex and the seeming impossibility of getting it that has driven male adolescents since the dawn of time. (The degree to which the extravagant drawings of penises that accompany the end credits of the movie are either a celebration or self-parody of these obsessions is another area open to discussion.) Superbad takes place on one particularly eventful night in the senior year of best friends Evan (Michael Cera, Arrested Development’s George Michael) and Seth (Jonah Hill, who has had memorable supporting parts in producer Judd Apatow’s other films). Nerds of differing stripes—Evan is brainier and shyer, Seth is bulkier and brasher, though no less desperate or ill-informed about the opposite sex—their life-long dependence on each other will soon be tested when they separate for college. If they actually had any experience of the sexual exploits they talk about, they would be unbearable: It’s the combination of their innocence and frustration that makes us able to laugh at and eventually with them. (That won’t be much comfort to the parents of teenaged girls, who will need to assure themselves that neither their daughters nor the young men chasing after them think or talk anything like these characters.) Though there’s an essential sweetness to the relationship between Jonah and Evan that comes out by the end of Superbad, that’s the only redeeming social value for a movie that luxuriates in raunchy dialogue and slapstick situations, some involving Rogan and Saturday Night Live’s Bill Hader as a pair of cops who aren’t much more mature than our heroes. It’s very funny stuff, but after three movies of this sort of thing, I hope that Rogan has some other tricks up his sleeve—it would be a shame if he were to burn out before he hits 30.

Our modern lives are submerged, day and night, in an ocean of fictions. Television, movies, books—they’ve poured thousands of stories into our eyes and ears. How many of these stories have we forgotten? Probably many more than we can remember. But imagine a place and time far in the past when stories were rare and the simple act of telling one had the power to change a human life.

There isn’t a penguin in sight throughout An Arctic Tale, which should surprise no schoolchild who knows that those birds that have been the subject of so many recent family films reside primarily in the Antarctic. Instead, the heroines of this live-action nature movie are a young walrus and a young polar bear, whom we follow from birth as they grow up in a land where the temperatures routinely reach minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But while their species are well-adapted toward life in this icy world, they face drastic changes as global warming alters the seasonal patterns on which they depend. An Arctic Tale was compiled from 800 hours of footage shot over a 15-year period by Adam Ravetch and Sarah Robertson. Their dedication is unquestionable, and some of the scenes they captured clearly came about only from their willingness to devote so much time to the project. So it’s forgivable that they allowed their material to be shaped into an anthropomorphized storyline in which many animals take the place of two. But I can’t help but wish that the story weren’t so written down for the tastes of audiences under the age of 10 (largely by Linda Woolverton, whose credits include Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Homeward Bound and The Lion King). It’s narrated by Queen Latifah in a voice you might employ for a bedtime story, directed toward the tastes of small children who find nothing funnier than flatulence. In the National Geographic television specials that I grew up on, the fact that you could see the explorers and filmmakers helped give what we were watching an element of realism that is ironically absent here: By removing themselves from their film, they make it easier for us to think of what we see as just another computer-generated fiction. That’s somewhat counterproductive for a movie that wants to energize its young viewers into ecologically proactive behavior.

As someone who loves to laugh, there’s nothing I enjoy more than a good farce. Dependent on precise craftsmanship, farce sets a number of characters and subplots spinning in opposing directions, moving perilously toward an inevitable collision. In the hands of a skillful writer and director, we become giddy with anticipation as the elements of a social disaster are constructed, set in motion, and sped up. The more complicated the elements and the faster they can be made to race around each other, the more satisfying is the climax. It sounds easier to do than it is, as demonstrated by this new film from director Frank Oz and writer Dean Craig. The setting is a British manor house where relatives gather for a funeral. There are implicit tensions between characters, like the brother who went to America to become a bestselling author and the brother who stayed home to tend to their parents, or the daughter planning to introduce her new boyfriend to her demanding father. Setting the plot in motion is a blackmailing stranger with a secret that must be kept from the family. All well and good. But Death at a Funeral puffs along like a barbecue grill with too little charcoal: When the cook periodically insists on adding more lighter fluid, the only result is a temporary fireball that gives the food an unpleasant taste. A bottle of hallucinogenic narcotics disguised as Valium causes some ridiculous behavior; an elderly invalid has to be helped onto the toilet by his fastidious nephew in a scene that temporarily threatens to launch this into the gross-out territory of a Farrelly Brothers comedy. That impulse doesn’t last, thank God, though it gives a bad taste (literally) to a comedy that might otherwise appeal to undemanding Masterpiece Theater fans for its low-key geniality. The biggest problem with Death at a Funeral is its predictability: The situations that aren’t obvious to the point of being hackneyed (like the antics of the nervous young swain accidentally dosed with drugs) are telegraphed a mile ahead. The able but underemployed cast includes Matthew Macfadyen, Peter Dinklage, Ewan Bremner, Peter Vaughn, Alan Tudyk and Paul McCartney’s one-time fiancé Jane Asher, to whom time has otherwise been kind.