The film displays a certain kinship with Sam Mendes's American Beauty, but Field is more tragedian than social satirist.

| Feb 9, 2007

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2007

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.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 5, 2007

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.

| Jan 5, 2007

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

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2007

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 4, 2007

Sure to raise heckles in the tabloid press, this is complex, thought-provoking cinema.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

The performances here are phenomenal.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 17, 2006

It's a beautifully insightful story co-written by Field and Tom Perrotta (based on his novel) that is sometimes unsettling but always engrossing, and ultimately heart-warming.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 11, 2006

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.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 4, 2006

The unrestrained (and rather excellent) trailer for Todd Field's Little Children would have us believe that the Whore of Babylon (possibly Kate Winslet) is coming for us on NJ Transit, with Pandora's Box in hand.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2006

Little Children ultimately seems to display the conformity to convention that so alarms its central characters.

| Oct 28, 2006

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.

| Oct 25, 2006

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.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Oct 20, 2006

Filled with moments of painful revelation, real comedy and emotional insight.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 20, 2006

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

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 20, 2006

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.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 20, 2006

A film you watch with mounting dread, yet cannot tear yourself away from: It's paced like a thriller with the timing of a smart comic.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 20, 2006

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?

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 20, 2006

It is a shrewd, darkly humorous look at supposed civility, at the ways in which we allow ourselves to settle and a rare depiction of motherhood as a less-than-awesome experience.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Oct 20, 2006