Little Children

Sarah Pierce discovers her husband's pornography habit and meets Brad Adamson at the neighbourhood pool. The friendship becomes an affair. Living in the same neighbourhood is Ronnie McGorvey, a sex offender recently released on parole, and the two lines eventually meet. Todd Field directed, adapting Tom Perrotta's novel with the author. Kate Winslet plays Sarah, Patrick Wilson plays Brad and Jackie Earle Haley plays Ronnie. It took three Oscar nominations: Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Adapted Screenplay. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 81 percent and Metacritic at 75. A. O. Scott called it challenging, accessible and hard to stop thinking about, and put it ninth on his list for the year. The box office was poor: 14.8 million dollars against a 26 million budget. The reason is distribution, since the film never played on more than thirty-two screens. Who it is for: viewers who like suburban unease and stories where nobody is innocent. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the Ronnie thread hard to take. The film refuses both to absolve him and to flatten him into a monster, and sitting between those two is uncomfortable.