So here's Shame! - a study of sex addiction in New York played for laughs, rather than lament. It's from the hand of Stuart Blumberg, who milked artificial insemination for lols with his script for The Kids are All Right, and now takes on directing duties for the first time, too. This film shares Kids' leading man, Mark Ruffalo, as well as its cocktail of first world tears and tickles. But the notes come through with heavier punch in this one: it's just as gluggable, but the aftertaste is less subtle. Sometimes it fizzes, at others - particularly a late scene involving a peripheral character's overdose - it curdles.

Ruffalo is a eco-friendly businessman five years sober (no sex, even with himself) after a period of energetic indulgence. He attends an addicts group where his mentor is Tim Robbins, who's dabbled in booze and violence, as well as OTT nookie, but now seems reformed and still happily married to childhood sweetheart Joely Richardson (underused). Ruffalo himself has a mentee: Josh Gad's slobby doctor, who spends his days covertly filming up his boss's skirt and his nights chowing and wanking (it's testimony to Gad how sympathetic he still seems). Pink plays another troubled romper who makes Gad her first non-fuck buddy.

Blumberg's screenplay is nothing if not structurally waterlight. Each lead's arc bisects neatly with the other; each character's sub-story chimes with appropriate counterpoint. Thus Robbins's son has returned home from a spell as a junkie, Ruffalo is tentatively dating Gwyneth Paltrow, who has food control issues, and Gad needs to tell mum Carol Kane to cut the apron strings before she emasculates him entirely.

Shame was erotic compulsion turned into opera, full of sombre vibrato. Thanks for Sharing is probably the more realistic, as well as more mainstream, and there's a generous pinch of very funny lines, mostly bestowed on Robbins. But the tutti fruit of its predecessor does make it seem all the more vanilla.