Interview. Todd Field.

Little Children is one of those rare films that transcends its source material," writes Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. "Firmly rooted in the present and in our current frame of mind - a time and frame of mind that few artists have shown interest in really exploring - 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."

Five years after In the Bedroom, David D'Arcy asks director Todd Field what it is he's got with adultery in the suburbs and about adapting an admired novel with the author.

Updated through 10/11.

Earlier: Critics are, as they say, split. For example: AO Scott in the New York Times (pro) and James Crawford at Reverse Shot (con).

Updates, 10/11: Slate's Dana Stevens: "You know from the get-go that it's beautiful, but it takes time and patience to discover that it's also funny, sexy, and sad."

David Denby in the New Yorker: "Field works with such fluid grace and perception that the movie goes right to the top of the suburban-anguish genre. The picture is not as aggressively designed or as witty as American Beauty; nor is it as malicious as Todd Solondz's Happiness. It's smarter, tougher, closer to the common life."

Posted by dwhudson at October 6, 2006 11:48 AM