Little Children Critic Reviews

Perrotta and Field succeed, not by guessing, but by knowing this world. They understand it enough to see it with cold precision -- and to approach it, at times, with disarming warmth. The characters aren't types, but people.Read the full review

The movie is one of the few films I can think of that examines the baffling combination of smugness, self-abnegation, ceremonial deference and status anxiety that characterizes middle-class Gen X parenting, and find sheer, white-knuckled terror at its core.Read the full review

A jolting, artfully made drama set in and around a suburban playground somewhere between "American Beauty" and "In the Bedroom" on America's psychic highway.Read the full review

The result is a movie that is challenging, accessible and hard to stop thinking about...But in too many recent movies intelligence is woefully undervalued, and it is this quality -- even more than its considerable beauty -- that distinguishes Little Children from its peers.Read the full review

Providing richness of detail and metaphor, elegantly blueprinted themes and impressive mastery of a constantly shifting tone, Little Children does just that. It is a deeply satisfying film.Read the full review

A hugely absorbing social drama that is, by turns, excruciating, sad and sardonic.Read the full review

This unnervingly funny and quietly devastating film -- director Todd Field's first since his smash 2001 debut with "In the Bedroom" -- pulls you in like a magnetic-force field.Read the full review

The rarest of movies - a literary multi-character drama. From the erudition of the voiceover narrative to the three dimensionality of the characters, Field's film is the closest it's possible to get to a book without reading one.Read the full review

All of the actors, most notably Winslet, are superb, but the movie belongs to Jackie Earle Haley, a former child actor.Read the full review