[The] performances help director Todd Field (In the Bedroom) calibrate a masterful mix of humor, tragedy and heavy stylization.
Comment
01/05/07
Little Children (2006)
80
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Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:152
Fresh:121
Rotten:31
Average Rating:7.4/10
Consensus: Little Children takes a penetrating look at suburbia and its flawed individuals with an unflinching yet humane eye.
Theatrical Release:03-11-2006
Synopsis: Actor-turned-director Todd Field follows up his Oscar-nominated drama, IN THE BEDROOM, with this ambitious adaptation of Tom Perrotta's celebrated novel. Set in the imploding minefields of modern... [More]
Starring: Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Gregg Edelman, Sadie Goldstein
Director: Todd Field
Reviews for Little Children
Led by illicit passions, the characters cross paths in unpredictable and shocking fashions, as Little Children builds to an astonishing finale. There's not a bad performance in the film, and Winslet, Haley and Emmerich are especially brilliant.
01/05/07
Little Children is disturbing and smart and the best satire of modern American suburbia since American Beauty.
01/05/07
Well-acted and meticulously crafted, Little Children can feel less like a full-blooded representation of life than a disquieting literary exercise.
01/05/07
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.
01/05/07
Top CriticAs 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.
01/05/07
[Little Children] benefits from mostly good acting but is not recommendable on any other level.
01/05/07
Downright chilling in the way it dissects the ins and outs of suburban life ... with shattering precision, like an anthropologist looking in from the outside.
01/05/07
Perhaps most satisfying when viewed as a particularly fraught, literate and beautifully acted soap opera; no doubt the movie's East Wyndham, Mass., is located on the same commuter train line that serves Peyton Place and Wisteria Lane.
01/05/07
A wonderfully impulsive, engrossing journey of lustful temptation and an engaging snapshot of fixation.
01/04/07
Field has merely looked down upon people trying to make sense of their lives, and judged them unworthy.
01/04/07
Little Children includes all the clichéd scenarios of a midday TV sudser, but they're ratcheted up several seedy degrees.
01/04/07
Filmmaker Todd Field seems to have completely missed the point of his source material, Tom Perrotta's tale of suburban angst, longing and temptation, which is at least slightly a parody.
01/04/07
A beautifully observed, profoundly moving tale of suburban malaise.
01/04/07
Unexpected compassion is one of the few hopeful things in Little Children, which will not be easy for moviegoers to shake. I saw it three months ago and I'm still chewing over its central irony.
01/04/07
The bulky melodrama spreads throughout the last half of the film like an acrid and unromantic miasma or like the shards of shattered marriage vows cast helter-skelter into an unknowable future.
01/04/07
Little Children is intentionally very literary, with narration that sometimes substitutes for dialogue and a symmetrical structure.
01/04/07
Little Children is outstanding and I think it will be one of those films that people don’t really recognize it’s greatness until a few years down the road.
01/02/07
A perfect companion piece to American Beauty, and just as good.
12/31/06
Little Children is a fable, complete with a full throated narrator and Aesopesque moral. It teaches its lesson almost like one that would be taught to children - with extreme scenarios and exaggerated characterizations.
12/31/06
Latest News for Little Children
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