Jon Martello is a very modern Don Juan. Awash in hot chicks, bedding a different knockout every night, he only truly gets off on pornography.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the star of "Don Jon" (Martello's nickname among his envious buddies at the local pickup club), also wrote and directed the movie, and it's an impressive debut. His Jon is an audacious comic creation, a strutting stereotype of young Italian-American manhood, from his sleeveless muscle shirts and greased-back neo-mullet haircut to the thick honk of his North Jersey accent. But in Gordon-Levitt's vision, he's a stereotype with soul — or at least the potential of something like it.

Jon is a compulsive guy. He's fanatically tidy (very into vacuuming his sex den apartment) and committed to a heavy schedule of gym workouts. He's devoted to his family — doting mom (Glenne Headly), sports nut dad (Tony Danza) and phone-addicted sister (Brie Larson) — and to his Catholic faith. (He never misses Mass or skips confession.) But he also sees nothing problematic about his porn habit. Early on, we witness him in a sweaty wrangle with a woman he has brought home from the club; as soon as she drifts off to sleep, he slips out of bed and into another room, where he fires up his laptop and starts cruising his favorite porn sites, a box of tissues close at hand. How could this be a problem?

Then he meets a girl named Barbara (Scarlett Johansson), a hot number with an addiction of her own. Barbara loves movies but only one kind — sappy romantic comedies. She sees Jon as a fixer-upper and compels him to start attending night school to make himself worthy of her idealizing love. She's also very slow to come across. In an especially funny scene at the door of her own apartment, to which she refuses to allow him entry ("I can't let you come inside just yet," she purrs), she allows Jon to dry-hump her from behind in the hallway.

Meanwhile, at night school, Jon meets an older woman named Esther (Julianne Moore). When Jon blithely admits his porn fixation, Esther isn't shocked; she simply suggests that sex might be better in full interaction with another person — for Jon, an alien concept.

Seeing as we spend considerable time watching Jon interacting with his laptop, Gordon-Levitt realizes he has to show us what's on the screen. He gives us glimpses of real Internet porn — bare breasts and wiggling butts sheened with carnal exertion — without stepping over into easy titillation. And he never strays far from the comical details of Jon's daily routines (especially his sessions in a church confessional, where he earnestly lists his sexual transgressions in exchange for a painless penance of Lord's Prayer and Hail Mary recitations).

As a director, Gordon-Levitt elicits deft performances from his actors. You might not expect Johansson to be convincing as a gum-chewing Jersey girl, but she pulls it off handily. And Danza gives a full-throttle performance as the elder Martello, whose own utilitarian attitudes about sex were obviously a model for Jon.

The movie is a quick, crisp 90 minutes, and Gordon-Levitt the actor carries off his role with a comic spirit that hasn't been entirely apparent in big-budget productions such as "The Dark Knight Rises" and "Inception." But the real surprise is his filmmaking skill. As a director, he's not just going places; he's already arrived.

'We Are What We Are'

"We Are What We Are" is a rich, dark horror movie that achieves much of its haunting effect through a pervasive atmosphere of dread and corruption. It's technically a remake of a 2010 Mexican cult film by Jorge Michel Grau, but director and co-writer Jim Mickle ("Stake Land") has extensively re-tooled the story, and the result is a much better-looking picture with a more complex weave of narrative themes.

The movie is set in the rainy woodlands of rural upstate New York. It begins with a sick and shaking woman, Emma Parker (Kassie DePaiva), falling into a ditch, where she dies. The surviving members of her family — husband Frank (Bill Sage), teenage daughters Iris (Ambyr Childers of "The Master") and Rose (Julia Garner of "Martha Marcy May Marlene") and small son Rory (Jack Gore) — are bereft. The clan maintains a shabby trailer park on one corner of their extensive land, and Frank repairs watches in a shack near their house, but they're barely getting by. Worse, Emma was a key participant in the family's "tradition," which dates back more than two centuries and involves the killing and eating of luckless individuals from the surrounding area. Frank always has been in charge of burying the victims' bones in a nearby riverbank; Emma's role was to brew their flesh into a chunky red soup to be consumed at solemn family dinners.

So this is a cannibal movie. But the spirit of George Romero, so heavily in evidence in most films of this sort, is only lightly invoked. There are some bloody shocks, for sure, but Mickle more often finds inventive ways of suggesting the gruesome goings-on without actually showing them to us. (One corpse is prepared for the kitchen by diagramming cuts of meat on its skin with crimson lipstick.)

Mickle's most interesting choice was to ground the family members' tradition in their singular religion. The ritual consumption of body-and-blood has a visceral resonance here, and there's a suggestive use of a Bible-like book to rationalize the Parkers' cannibalism. ("All is forgiven in the eyes of the Lord," Frank says, in a brooding patriarchal tone. "It was God who chose for us to be this way.")

Complications arise when a storm washes away part of the riverbank and the local doctor (Michael Parks of "Django Unchained" and the "Kill Bill" films) finds a human bone in the exposed soil. At the same time, elder daughter Iris has been approached by a police deputy, named Anders (Wyatt Russell), who has long been in love her and now tells her so. Iris feels a reciprocal romantic impulse, but she has inherited the family culinary duties from her dead mother and now must turn Anders away. Sister Rose, on the other hand, is sick of the gruesome family tradition. "I wish we were like everyone else," she says. Iris tells her, "We're not."

The movie is beautifully designed. The drenching rain and howling winds outside the Parkers' house impart a sense of hopeless isolation, and the low-lit interiors — illuminated by candles and kerosene lamps — create a mood of oppressive intimacy. This is a very stylish picture. And what really sets it apart from other genre exercises is the family members' clear love for one another — a mutual devotion that is beginning to be eaten away by the hideous activities that they've never before questioned. The movie ends in a scene of hair-raising depravity, but even here, in a way, that devotion endures.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.