We Need to Talk About Kevin: Critic Reviews

The movie is creepy, but it has no texture or depth. It's like The Omen directed by Miranda July.

Ms. Ramsay, with ruthless ingenuity, creates a deeper dread and a more acute feeling of anticipation by allowing us to think we know what is coming and then shocking us with the extent of our ignorance.

What happens when bad children happen to good parents? Does it mean they are not, in fact, as good as they had imagined themselves to be? With these questions, British director Lynne Ramsay has created a nihilist tale of guilt and horror.

It's an arty horror movie set within the context of a dysfunctional family, focusing on the massively strained relationship between a conflicted mother and a sociopathic son.

Lynne Ramsay's thoughtful, unnerving film works its strange power over viewers who are likely to find themselves as compelled as repelled by its fatally flawed key players.

Some movies punish you, but you take it because you're getting something out of the bargain: an insight, a performance, art, adrenaline. Then there are the movies that punish you for the heck of it.

By treating Kevin's evil as a mystery to be solved, Ramsay only succeeds in making what was once allusive banal.

"We Need to Talk About Kevin" isn't afraid of the conversation, no matter how painful.

View more MSN videosGo to MSN Video One of the most relentlessly and purposefully harrowing movies of the year...

The actors are uniformly skillful (and Reilly's voice is one of the current cinema's charms), but Ramsay gives them little but prefabricated attitudes to work with.

That the film works so brilliantly is a tribute in large part to the actors.

The boy (played by a trio of child actors) is so unremittingly evil that the movie begins to feel like a grotesque remake of that old John Ritter comedy Problem Child.

Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.

It's a hallmark of "Kevin's" emotional bravery and intellectual honesty that the questions haunt us long after the end credits roll.

Director Ramsay makes Kevin's impact all the more felt by coming at it from all angles.

Swinton is astounding.

A morbid, misguided mess with a fractured narrative, guaranteed to drive audiences away in droves.

Present in every scene so that there's no doubt that her character's consciousness is filtering what's seen, Swinton delivers a concrete-hard central perf that's up there with her best work.

Swinton and Reilly make no sense as a couple, which is all of a piece with "We Need To Talk About Kevin,'' where everyone's motivations manage to seem simultaneously arbitrary and inevitable pretty much all the time.

There's no equivocating ... over the excellence of the acting by Swinton and casting find Ezra Miller

Part horror, part drama, part cautionary tale, We Need to Talk About Kevin is a film that will lodge in your memory long after the end credits.

Ezra Miller's sneering, absurdly precocious evil-child performance makes him just another bad-seed horror villain.

There are so many great things happening on almost every level of this movie, from Swinton's haunting, magnetic and tremendously vulnerable performance...

Even in the film's weaker stretches, the fierce presence of Tilda Swinton made it impossible to tear my eyes away.

This is a depressing motion picture, yet the issues it addresses are real, especially in a world where the term "childhood innocence" is losing all meaning.