‎Pretty Persuasion (2005) directed by Marcos Siega • Reviews, film + cast • Letterboxd

Pretty Persuasion

2005 Directed by Marcos Siega

The devil wears a grey skirt and her name is Kimberly Joyce.

A 15-year-old girl incites chaos among her friends and a media frenzy when she accuses her drama teacher of sexual harassment.

Evan Rachel Wood Selma Blair David Wagner Brent Goldberg Adi Schnall Elisabeth Harnois Stark Sands Jane Krakowski Michael Hitchcock Danny Comden Jaime King Josh Zuckerman James Snyder Ron Livingston Cody McMains Mike Erwin James Woods Octavia Spencer Angelo Spizzirri Christopher Thornton Clyde Kusatsu Robert Joy Julie Wittner Navid Negahban Veena Bidasha Tina Holmes Alex Désert Shanna Olson Lisa Arturo Show All… Johnny Lewis

Alternative Titles

Dulce Pesuasión, Pretty Persuasion - UC

comedy drama

105 mins More details at IMDb TMDb Report this film

Popular reviews

Review by willa ★½ 3

i was like oh im gonna watch a #fun movie instead of a 3 hour slow moving subtitled pretentious ass movie like usual but the joke was on me because the only time i've ever had fun watching a movie was during The Social Network (2010). the moral of the story is that every movie should be The Social Network (2010).
Review by Graham Williamson ★½ 2

A great movie villain is only as good as their enemies. When we first meet Kimberly Joyce, she's presented to us as a master manipulator, a schoolgirl Machiavelli making her way through an elite prep school. Yet her record doesn't quite back this up. Her marks include sleazy teachers, vapid schoolgirls and her own bigoted, ranting father. But they're not all idiots. Jane Krakowski plays a slick TV journalist who Kimberly successfully manipulates by - I hope you're sitting down for this - betting that she's more interested in career advancement than the truth. Sadly, the film ends before she can face off against a barrel of fish armed only with a gun, but I'm sure her scheming, brilliant mind…
Review by Mike D'Angelo ★★★

57/100

[originally published on my blog]

On the one hand, I can't pretend to be completely unbiased about Pretty Persuasion, a very black comedy that opens tomorrow in New York and Los Angeles. I have slept on the fold-out couch of its screenwriter and co-producer, Skander Halim, and he, by turn, has taken one look at my couch, which does not fold out and which comfortably seats maybe 1.5 normal-sized people, and immediately announced, "There's no way in hell I can sleep on that." (I gave him the bed, which was kind of a Pyrrhic victory for him given that the mattress was delivered the next morning.) In Rotterdam two years ago, we split the cost of a rather expensive…
Review by Steve G 💚 ★

Pretty Persuasion is an absolutely pointless film that seems to be under the mistaken impression that it’s edgy, provocative and telling us stuff that we didn’t already know or that we haven’t already seen in a hundred other high school films.

The likes of Mean Girls and Clueless were able to not only be effortlessly funny and smart, but they were able to be satirical by having a complete awareness of their setting and surroundings and without pushing anything any harder than they needed do. Pretty Persuasion does not ever have the tools to be or do any of those things. With a complete lack of directorial subtlety and almost no likeable characters as well as an awful storyline, it’s…
Review by Austin ★★★★★

Have been looking for this film for ages and stumbled upon it at the local mom and pop video store for $1. Deal. Was as great as I hoped.
Review by Catherine Stebbins ★★★★ 1

am i a terrible person for loving this? because i loved this

Recent reviews

Review by Not Leonard Maltin ★½

D: Marcos Siega. Evan Rachel Wood, Ron Livingston, James Woods, Jane Krakowski, Elisabeth Harnois, Selma Blair, Danny Comden, Robert Joy, Jaime King, Michael Hitchcock, Octavia Spencer. Superficial, self-satisfied snipe at privileged Beverly Hills kids and their messed-up parents, as seen through an unenlightening portrait of a teenage psychopath (Evan Rachel Wood) who destroys everyone with whom she comes into contact. Glib, just like Woods’ portrayal of the girl’s scummy, bigoted father. There’s no one to root for in this poisonous cast of characters. Panavision. [R]
Review by Kori ★★★½

Cast Evan in more gay.
Review by Lexi ★★★★

this was.... surprisingly good. some of the jokes did not land, but overall i enjoyed it. super dark!
Review by Aiii83 ★★★

Evan Rachel Woods varies this two star movie to three. Great performance on her part, mediocre script.
Review by invisiblethomas ★★★½

Evan Rachel Wood is so good and has been for awhile. I hadn’t watched this in about a decade, so I wanted to see if it held up. I think it does, for the most part. We don’t get enough of these types of dark comedies. It doesn’t always work and it is a little too long, and while it’ll never be a classic like Mean Girls or Heathers, I think it holds its own.
Review by Toni ★★★

What a wild film! I had no idea what it would be like before watching, but the tone seems to be satire/dark comedy which works well considering its themes. Evan Rachel Wood is wonderful!
Review by Leonardo Mattei ★★

Mildly funny movie.
Review by lyndseybelle ★

By far the most pointless film I’ve ever seen in my life????? Literally nothing happens in the end it just...ends??? What??? How do you draw something out for 2 hours and then just....nothing? This is I hate white girls: the movie
Review by TJ D_____ ★★★

The last third saved this a bit for me--up until that point, Pretty Persuasion felt like a lesser teen comedy to Election and Clueless and Ghost World and even American Pie. But by the end, the rough edges started to become a feature, not a bug, for me. It's an interesting piece of work that really hits a home run with the ending, which, sure, teetered on ham-fisted, but manages to coalesce all of the themes into this primary character.