Little Children: Critic Reviews

Little Children [is] a jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between American Beauty and In the Bedroom on America's psychic highay...

Todd Fields' superb film adaptation of the novel by Tom Perrotta result is challenging, accessible and hard to stop thinking about.

There are plenty of laughs and plenty of shocks, though, and plenty of shifts of narrative viewpoint within the ensemble to keep you on your toes.

An engaging tale of middle-class suburbia, with its attendant fears, yearnings and rushes to judgment.

A hugely absorbing social drama that is, by turns, excruciating, sad and sardonic.

What Little Children understands so well, and so poignantly, is a kind of parental existentialism that hits 30- somethings with kids: How does having children make you such a less interesting adult?

Suburbia continues to serve as the dartboard of choice for filmmakers bent on demonstrating their urbane superiority to the dull denizens of tract housing.

Built from a perfect story-telling collaboration.

As Little Children skitters along, it gathers weight, like a snowball, until it finally knocks you cold.

The sexual awakening of a disappointed wife may seem like an old movie turn, but when has it been done with such candor?

I didn't like any of these characters, but I kept pulling for them anyway -- right up to the shock-o-riffic ending, when I felt I'd been sucker-punched.

Unnervingly good, Little Children is one of the rare American films about adultery that feels right -- dangerous, hushed, immediate -- even when the sex takes a back seat to other longings.

As in Field's first film, the characters are drawn with such compassion their follies become our own and their desires seem as vast as the night sky.

Tonal inconsistencies don't blunt the keenness of its satire, so sharp that I walked out with emotional razor burn.

A beautifully observed, profoundly moving tale of suburban malaise.

A small wonder of a movie that puts its characters in playground swings and then gives them a push. Watch them fly this way and that, dangling between peril and ecstasy. And see if you don't recognize yourself.

Little Children includes all the cliched scenarios of a midday TV sudser, but they're ratcheted up several seedy degrees.

Seldom these days does one encounter such an intricate narrative so persuasively performed by the entire cast, most notably by Ms. Winslet and Mr. Wilson as the adulterous lovers.

From start to finish, it is artistic, viable, wry and wrenching.

A deftly made, emotionally acute and at times a tad fastidious examination of cracks in middle-class American family life.

Every character except the kids is severely flawed, but so deep are the roots Perrotta has created that you wish everyone well -- even the sex offender.

Little Children is disturbing and smart and the best satire of modern American suburbia since American Beauty.

Field and Perrotta find the humour in human foibles, but it is the drama of humdrum lives that draws their fascination and sympathy. And in Winslet and Wilson, they have found a most fascinating pair.

To these disappointed eyes, Little Children seems a frustrating mess.

I'm sorry, an interesting premise, a keen eye and a veneer of emotional seriousness are not enough.