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It must be a right old laugh down at the Parent and Baby screenings these days. In the past month we've had vacuous career-and-baby juggling comedy I Don't Know How She Does It, a film so patronising, so reductive and so formulaic, that if one were to set about it with a buzzsaw, its arterial spray would drip down the wall to form the single coagulated word 'Generic'. And we've had Abduction, in which a young man discovers the woman he thought was his birth mom is actually an imposter. (Which somehow brings to mind this reviewer's new favourite joke: What did the boy say to the stepladder? 'I hate you – you're not my real ladder!!')

And trailing behind, like a foot-dragging teenager on a family holiday, here's a startling adaptation of We Need To Talk About Kevin from the former mistress of Scottish miserabilism, Lynne Ramsay. Hateful, homicidal and sharp as an arrow head, Kevin Khatchadourian is one of the great literary monsters of our time, a furious, physical manifestation of his career-mum's own ambivalence towards motherhood. But is Kevin really just a born-Satan? Or the inevitable result of bad parenting?

Shriver's novel craftily allows for dual, even simultaneous readings, although Ramsay's adaptation, less psychodrama than impressionistic horror, pretty much nails its genre colours to the mast from the outset. And all those colours are red. Fittingly, the film's dominant palette is the colour of murder, represented in almost every frame: a fire alarm; a pool of strawberry jam, insolently seeping from between two chaste white slices; a supermarket shelf of tomato soup cans, against which Eva (an excellent Swinton) splays herself, a sunken-eyed rabbit frozen in the death-stare of public outrage.

Screen Kevin is eeeeevil, no question – and he's going to make poor Eva pay and pay for her non-maternalism. "I'm going straight to Hell, eternal damnation, the whole thing" she blithely informs a pair of doorstepping missionaries, and she's absolutely correct. Whether he's cheerfully cultivating computer viruses the way others collect matchboxes, or leering at her like a satyr after she accidentally walks in on him masturbating, so relentless is Kevin's high dudgeon the film often risks tipping over into comedy. At any moment, you half expect him to pull a marmot out of a sack and start quoting Lebowski: 'I am a nihilist! I believe in nothing!' While his wolfing down of a lychee with hideous lip-smacking relish, mere minutes after his ridiculously angelic little sister has lost an eyeball in a highly suspicious cleaning fluid accident, is pure Hannibal Lector – a step too far in an otherwise carefully controlled film, steeped in Kubrickian menace.

A monster movie at heart then, but a smart one. Eva may be superficially presented as just another victim, yet locked together in some sick symbiosis with her son (brilliantly played by three actors, including a superbly saturnine Ezra Miller), she has more in common with him than either would care to admit. And tellingly, unlike Kevin's dupe of a dad or sap of a sister, mum's the only one this little devil ever shows his true face to. As the former proprietor of the Bates Motel once noted, "A boy's best friend is his mother."

It takes guts, too, to commence a movie with its single most powerful sequence: a squirming, orgiastic Valencian festival scene, in which a euphoric Swinton, arms outstretched in cruciform, is baptised in the juice of pulped tomatoes – as crimson as the walls of Gladstone High after Kevin has lain down his crossbow; as scarlet as the vengeful paint that splatters Eva's porch in its aftermath. In a film laden with visual riches, nothing ever quite tops it.

A prime candidate for a 'If you've been affected by any of the issues raised in this programme' tag, Exile sees Simm's disgraced hack flee to his Lancashire hometown for the first time in 18 years, to discover his once idolised reporter dad destroyed by Alzheimer's – along with a hideous buried scandal.

Befitting the title, both father and son are exiles – from their careers, from sense, from truth; here, investigative reporting makes a fine metaphor for a crusade against the corruption of memory, and the pursuit of identity itself.

Essentially a three-hander between Simm (cornering the brooding everyman corner), the wonderful Colman (playing it straight) and the mighty Broadbent, the latter's portrayal of this terrible condition must be among the most devastatingly accurate ever placed on screen. Shocking and extremely moving, with a final scene that's – ironically – quite unforgettable.

"We were outcasts of our own micro-society" observes the doomed protagonist of Barbet Schroeder's 1969 cult curio. Specifically, he's talking about being a junkie, during an era when hash and LSD were considered more conducive to peace and love. But he could also be talking about More itself.

Pink Floyd aficionados may know it, if at all, for the band's soundtrack (even then, the film manages to misspell Dave Gilmour's name); but compared with classic head fare like Easy Rider or Performance, More is something of a bejewelled footnote.

Says Schroeder, it's "less a story of its time, more a timeless tragedy", and this contemporary staging of the Icarus myth is indeed an eternal tale of crash and burn. And yet this fascinating document positively reeks of the late-1960s from every pore. Exquisitely photographed (on location in Ibiza), and seductive and patience-testing by turns, it's a trip alright, but a smarter and more sober one than you'd expect.