Attack of the Puppet People - 1958

Attack of the Puppet People (also known as I Was a Teenage Doll (working title), Six Inches Tall (UK) and The Fantastic Puppet People) is a 1958 American black-and-white science fiction Horror film directed, produced and written by Bert I. Gordon.

It stars John Hoyt as an eccentric doll maker. It was produced by Alta Vista Productions and distributed by American International Pictures. The film was rushed into production by American International Pictures and Bert I. Gordon to capitalise on the success of The Incredible Shrinking Man, which had been released in 1957.

The film begins with a Brownie troop visiting a doll manufacturing company called Dolls Inc., owned and operated by the seemingly kindly Mr. Franz (John Hoyt). As the girls tour the factory, they see a number of very lifelike dolls stored in glass canisters locked in a display case on the wall. These are part of Mr. Franz’s special collection. Sally Reynolds (June Kenney) answers a newspaper advertisement for a secretary; Franz's previous one has mysteriously vanished. Although she is concerned about his obsession with his dolls, she reluctantly agrees to take the job. She soon meets a traveling salesman, Bob Westley (John Agar), who introduces himself as the best salesman in St. Louis and immediately sets about attempting to seduce her. Their relationship become serious enough that Bob persuades Sally to quit her job, promising to break the news to Franz.

The next day however, Franz informs Sally that Bob has gone back home to take care of business and that she should forget him. She, however, is unwilling to accept this and goes to the police with a theory about Franz' role in her boyfriend's disappearance ("He made Bob into a doll!"), but Sergeant Paterson (Jack Kosslyn) is skeptical. Franz has developed a machine which can shrink people down to a sixth of their original size. He then uses it on anyone who tries to leave him. When he finds that Sally plans to quit, she becomes his latest victim.

Little Children - 2006

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Little Children is a 2006 American drama film directed by Todd Field. It is based on the novel of the same name by Tom Perrotta, who along with Field wrote the screenplay. It stars Kate Winslet, Patrick Wilson, Jennifer Connelly, Jackie Earle Haley, Noah Emmerich, Gregg Edelman, Phyllis Somerville and Will Lyman. The original music score is composed by Thomas Newman. The film premiered at the 44th New York Film Festival organized by the Film Society of Lincoln Center.

Sarah Pierce (Kate Winslet) is a reluctant housewife and mother in an upper-middle class suburb of Boston. She is married to Richard Pierce (Gregg Edelman), a successful yet distant husband, who is secretly obsessed with an internet porn star. Sarah refers to her daughter Lucy as an "unknowable little person" and feels out of place around the other mothers at a local playground.

Brad Adamson (Patrick Wilson) is a former college football player who's married to Kathy (Jennifer Connelly), a documentary filmmaker, with a young son named Aaron. Brad is depressed and frustrated, as his wife is the breadwinner and he is a stay-at-home father who has failed the bar exam twice. Each day he leaves home with the pretense of going to the library to study, but spends the time watching skateboarders at the nearby park. He joins a policeman's touch football team at the urging of a friend, Larry Hedges (Noah Emmerich), a disgraced former police officer.

The Los Angeles Times's Carina Chocano said "Little Children is one of those rare films that transcends its source material. 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."