We Need to Talk About Kevin (2012)
Average Rating: 7.4/10
Reviews Counted: 186
Fresh: 141 | Rotten: 45
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a masterful blend of drama and horror, with fantastic performances across the board (Tilda Swinton especially, delivering one of her very best).
Average Rating: 7.2/10
Critic Reviews: 43
Fresh: 30 | Rotten: 13
We Need to Talk About Kevin is a masterful blend of drama and horror, with fantastic performances across the board (Tilda Swinton especially, delivering one of her very best).
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Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 30,849
Movie Info
A suspenseful and gripping psychological thriller, Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin explores the factious relationship between a mother and her son. Tilda Swinton, in a bracing, tour-de-force performance, plays the mother, Eva, as she contends for 15 years with the increasing malevolence of her first-born child, Kevin (Ezra Miller). Based on the best-selling novel of the same name, We Need to Talk About Kevin explores nature vs. nurture on a whole new level as Eva's own culpability is
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Cast
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Tilda Swinton
Eva -
John C. Reilly
Franklin -
Ezra Miller
Kevin -
Ashley Gerasimovich
Celia -
Ursula Parker
Lucy -
Jasper Newell
Kevin (8 Years Old) -
Rocky Duer
Kevin (Toddler) -
Siobhan Fallon
Wanda
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We Need to Talk About Kevin Trailer & Photos
All Critics (187) | Top Critics (43) | Fresh (141) | Rotten (45) | DVD (4)
It becomes a film about her [Swinton] scattered mind. That produces wonders from Swinton, but it ignores the plea in the title. What about Kevin? Kevin deserves so much more attention-indeed, he deserves being played by Tilda Swinton.
Fragmented, dreamlike, a whir of memories and misery, We Need to Talk About Kevin is unsettling, but also somehow unnecessary.
"We Need to Talk About Kevin" is confrontational cinema that will leave you speechless.
Director Ramsay makes Kevin's impact all the more felt by coming at it from all angles.
It's a hallmark of "Kevin's" emotional bravery and intellectual honesty that the questions haunt us long after the end credits roll.
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.
As a psychological study of a shattered mother struggling to make sense of a heinous crime carried out by her teenage son, it's endlessly fascinating.
A high school killing spree leads to a captivating examination of parenthood and the 'nature vs nurture' debate.
A real-world horror movie -- for parents.
It may not be a crowd-pleaser, but it's not every day we get an emotional powerhouse of a film done this well.
We Need To Talk About Kevin is a brooding, unnerving but wholly rewarding film.
It would be easy to say that the film would be nothing without Tilda Swinton. It wouldn't, but the narrative is quite engaging and Swinton's isn't the only terrific performance.
There's an infinitely more impactful movie to be made that deals with the same subject but doesn't take things to an unrealistic extreme. A son that's not the very spawn of the devil is a solid place to start.
One of the most chilling films of 2011
The best horror penetrates beyond external vibe to internal thought-process and the film never truly takes us within the mother's head.
Un drama psicológico tenso y abrumador, en algún punto quizás insoportable. Al final, nadie espera que se entienda por qué pasó lo que pasó, pero sí al menos que se tenga una aproximación a lo que es vivir con una pesadilla a cuestas.
Whatever you think of the philosophical weight of Ramsay's film - I find it ... less nuanced than David Foster Wallace's one liner that Hobbes was simply "Rousseau in a dark mirror" - there's a fierce integrity in Swinton's performance.
Irony clashes with disturbing drama
A powerful look inside a mother's torment
A pretentious, unpleasant, woolly headed movie that's nothing more than a cheesy horror picture for people who wouldn't be caught dead going to a cheesy horror picture.
Smug but fascinating: The movie is a woman's cry of anguish for an unjust world that enables men at all levels of age and power to get away with cruelty, brutality, murder and even war because, well, 'that's what boys DO.'
Swinton doesn't say much; she doesn't have to. Her tear-stained eyes and anguished face carry all her emotions. In a career filled with so many terrific, subtle performances, this is clearly one of her best.
Rock Duer's a shoo-in if they ever make Satan: The Toddler Years and Jasper Newell manages to project an aura of pure evil even in pull-ups, but it's Ezra Miller as the adolescent Kevin who makes you believe you're in the presence of an American monster.
Of all the nomination flubs made this past January by the Academy of Harvey Weinstein Arts and Sciences, the most egregious mistake was arguably the lack of a Best Actress nod for Tilda Swinton.
Watching it isn't easy, but it is definitely worth having waited for.
Audience Reviews for We Need to Talk About Kevin
Super Reviewer
Super Reviewer
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- Eva: Why?
- Kevin: I used to think I knew. Now I'm not so sure.
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- Kevin: Have I ever been?
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- Eva: Two years. Plenty of time to think about it. I want you to tell me... why?
- Kevin: I used to think I knew. Now I'm not so sure.
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- Kevin: It's like this: you wake and watch TV, get in your car and listen to the radio you go to your little jobs or little school, but you don't hear about that on the 6 o'clock news, why? 'Cause nothing is really happening, and you go home and watch some more TV and maybe it's a fun night and you go out and watch a movie. I mean it's got so bad that half the people on TV, inside the TV, they're watching TV. What are these people watching, people like me?
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- Kevin: I am the context.
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- Eva: Why would you have something like that?
- Kevin: I collect them.
- Eva: Isn't that a weird thing to collect?
- Kevin: Unlike stamps.
- Eva: Well, what's the point?
- Kevin: There is no point. That's the point.
Discussion Forum
| Topic | Last Post | Replies |
|---|---|---|
| Kevin's punishment | 9 months ago | 2 |
| Movie | 7 months ago | 1 |
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Foreign Titles
- Tenemos que hablar de Kevin (ES)



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