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Men In Black 3

It’s not a sequel that needed to be made, but thanks to the charm of its leads and a tone that harks back to the wit and humour of the original, it’s a pretty enjoyable trip.

Bel Ami

The excellent female support cast saves this patchy effort, which is let down by its leading man and a flat screenplay.

The Dictator

A disappointing, often repulsive and mean-spirited mess of a film with seemingly only one real criterion on its agenda: to shock and offend.

The Woman In Black

Packed with atmosphere, this old-fashioned but deftly told ghost story delivers ample chills and thrills.

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We Need To Talk About Kevin (Film)

by Joshua Blackman | November 14, 2011 13:36 | Edited November 14, 2011 13:37

Playing out like an intense psycho-horror and driven by Tilda Swinton’s fearless performance, this brilliantly and chillingly crafted film leaves an indelible mark.

The versatile and striking Tilda Swinton delivers yet another fearless performance in We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's award winning novel. An intense psycho-horror about the perils of motherhood, the film has the same kind of faux-reality as Black Swan, only one less deliriously theatrical and more terrifyingly banal. This is an excruciatingly tense and artful meditation on a difficult subject, and one that will linger long after its 112 minutes are up.

 

Unlike the novel, the film is coy about the big event that crushes our protagonist, Eva (Swinton), which is a smart move because it keeps narrative tension high. We know that her son, Kevin (played unsettlingly by Jasper Newell as a young child, and Ezra Miller as a teenager), was responsible for something horrific, and Ramsay keeps it ambiguous by criss-crossing in time before and after - from Eva's pregnancy to her severe, post-traumatic depression. Compounding her feelings of guilt and loss are the hostile responses from town locals, who sneer at her venomously and vandalise her home. Swinton (also producer) is sublime as Eva, a woman who represents a mother's worst parenting fears, and who implodes in horror after realising that her son has become (or always has been?) a sociopathic, petulant monster. Is Eva's sketchy parenting to blame? Or is Kevin just a bad seed?

 

Kevin is so monstrous that the answers seem obvious, but they remain elusive even when the film acknowledges that, whether Eva likes it or not, there is a primal connection between the two of them. We Need To Talk About Kevin is a fractured nightmare of reds (a tomato fight at Plaza Del Pueblo in Spain, the gash of paint across Eva's slummy townhouse), sound design, and narrative suspense. Brilliantly made and completely terrifying, it's one of the year's best.