It takes a special talent to hang on screen with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise, but Kirsten Dunst was utterly memorable in Anne Rice's Gothic vampire tale.
A year after telling Pony Boy to "stay gold," 12-year-old Ralph Macchio became Mr. Miyagi's "wax on, wax off" protege in "The Karate Kid."
Jonathan Ke Quan was the comic relief to the dark "Raiders" sequel, with hilarious quips from "No more parachutes" to "I touch nothing" to "You call him Dr. Jones, doll!"
Before "The Lord of the Rings" and "No Country for Old Men," Sean Astin and Josh Brolin led a band of child treasure hunters in the Spielberg-Donner classic "The Goonies."
Anchored by Anthony Michael Hall and Molly Ringwald, The Brat Pack churned out hit after hit for John Hughes, from "Sixteen Candles" to "Weird Science" to "The Breakfast Club."
The plot was simple: four kids search for a dead body. The character depth and emotions were anything but, with a powerhouse River Phoenix leading Wil Wheaton, Jerry O'Connell and Corey Feldman.
Long before Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy, Christian Bale played Steven Spielberg's young English boy struggling to survive under Japanese occupation during World War II.
There was not an 8-year-old boy in America who didn't want to be Macauley Culkin after seeing "Home Alone." Slapping his cheeks and laying traps for robbers, he was an instant pop culture fixture.
"The Sandlot" captured the same nostalgic narration as "A Christmas Story," "Stand By Me" and "The Wonder Years," and leading the way was the kid legend of Bennie "The Jet" Rodriguez, smacking the cover off a baseball and outrunning The Beast in his P.F. Flyers.
Holly Hunter and Anna Paquin both won Oscars playing a mute mother and young daughter sent to 1850s New Zealand with their prized piano in Jane Campion's touching classic.
Sixteen years before her Oscar for "Black Swan," Natalie Portman burst onto the screen as a teenager rescued by an assassin after her parents are killed in a police raid.
He was told repeatedly, "You'll shoot your eye out," but Peter Billingsley's Ralphie was determined to get his hands on that Red Ryder B.B. gun. Today, we can't get enough of his black-rimmed glasses and nostalgic narration as the film airs 24-7 around Christmastime.
He stopped the world with one bit of trivia: "Did you know the human head weighs 8 pounds?" Jonathan Lipnicki's adorable kid was the main reason Tom Cruise stayed with Renee Zellweger in Cameron Crowe's romantic comedy hit.
She's all grown up now, but Hayden Panettiere stole the show in "Remember the Titans" as the feisty daughter of an assistant high school football coach, drawing up Xs and Os in chalk talk with Denzel Washington.
A generation of "Harry Potter" fans grew up with Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint. After eight movies, it's fascinating to look back at the first and see how young, innocent and lively they were at the start of the journey.
It takes a lot to upstage Denzel Washington, but Dakota Fanning did just that as young Pita calling for her "Creasy Bear" to save her from Mexican abductors.
We first met Abigail Breslin as the girl leaving behind water glasses in "Signs," but her striptease an overweight contender in a child beauty pageant made us double over in laughter in "Little Miss Sunshine."
It's one of Will Smith's best performances, and the main reason may be because he's playing off his own son, Jaden, the heir to the Fresh Prince.
Thinking back on Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire," you may remember the game show and "Jai Ho" final dance. But the best parts of the film come when Ayush Mahesh Khedekar and his fellow child actors scrounge around the slums of Mumbai.
"Let the Right One In" may be one of the best movies of the last decade, putting "Twilight" to shame. Kare Hedebrant plays young Oskar, who overcomes his bullies by befriending a young vampire named Eli. Hollywood remade it as "Let Me In."
It's a child performance that will be talked about for years. Quvenzhane Wallis is the adorably fierce Hushpuppy, yearning for her absent mother and learning to roar like her father on the "wrong side" of a levee.
Atticus Finch raised his children right, and Mary Badham's Jean Louise "Scout" Finch was tough as nails with a moral center. She thwarted the KKK with a simple phrase, "Hey, Mr. Cunningham," and melted our hearts with the line, "Hey, Boo."
The original tiny superstar, Shirley Temple was 10 when she starred in "The Little Princess," paving the way for all child stars to follow. She was so famous that people still order drinks with her name without even realizing it.
Mickey Rooney was famous for his "Andy Hardy" series when they teamed him with up-and-comer Juudy Garland in "Babes in Arms." The Busby Berkeley musical was MGM's biggest grosser of the year, surpassing Garland's "The Wizard of Oz."
Before the multiple marriages and sultry screen roles in films like "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof," Elizabeth Taylor burst on the screen riding horseback at age 12 in "National Velvet." The AFI recently voted the film No. 24 on its list of most inspirational movies.
Every Christmas, 9-year-old Natalie Wood wows us with the faith of a child, tugging on the beard of old Santa Claus in this holiday classic.
The Italian Neorealist movement of the post-war '40s was built on casting non-actors in real locations. Director Vittorio De Sica struck gold with young Enzo Staiola in "Bicycle Thieves," serving as the moral center to his father's growing desperation.
Alan Ladd may have been the title character, but 11-year-old Brandon De Wilde stole the show as the young kid idolizing his western hero. He was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, along with his much older co-star Jack Palance.
Robert Mitchum was legendary as Harry Powell's knuckle-tattooed villain, but young Billy Chapin was the tough force that stood up to him, hiding $10,000 in his sister's baby doll.
Perhaps the most famous child actor in French history, Jean-Pierre Leaud was the on-screen proxy for Francois Truffaut's semi-autobiographical tale of poverty. Truffaut even used some of the audition tapes in the actual film.
Tatum O'Neal starred with her father, Ryan, in Peter Bogdanovich's tale of the Great Depression, where a con man raises a young girl who may or may not be his daughter.
In one of the most chilling performances of all time, 14-year-old Linda Blair convulsed, cursed and vomited as a Georgetown teen possessed by Satan. Granted, she had a big assist from Mercedes McCambridge's demonic voice.
If anyone came close to topping Linda Blair's horrific child performance, it was Harvey Stephens as the anti-Christ Damien. His screaming at a pool table got under Lee Remick's skin, and his pleas of "daddy no" tried to deter Gregory Peck from killing him.
Martin Scorsese knew a star was born when teenage Jodie Foster played Harvey Keitel's prostitute needing to be saved by Robert DeNiro in "Taxi Driver." The role came a full 15 years before "Silence of the Lambs."
The real star of Terrence Malick's allegory may be the "magic hour" daylight, but Linda Manz carries us through with doomsday narration.
The subject of a custody battle between Dustin Hoffman and Meryl Streep, 8-year-old Justin Henry, was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, becoming the youngest nominee for a competitive award in Academy history.
Two words: "Red Rum."
Henry Thomas laid a trail of Reese's Pieces, while Drew Barrymore taught him to talk. The two youngsters loved the adorable alien to death and moved us to tears in Steven Spielberg's immortal children's movie.
Few things are creepier than the blond-haired Heather O'Rourke staring at a static TV set and saying, "They're here!" The entire plot revolved around her Carol Anne getting sucked into another dimension.
Jason Fraley, WTOP film critic
WASHINGTON – Did you wait to see “The Artist” or “Slumdog Millionaire” after they won Best Picture?
The next indie tidal wave is coming — and here’s your chance to get in on the ground floor.
There’s a little film just starting to trickle into theaters that you will soon be hearing a lot about. It’s already taken the festival circuit by storm, winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and the Golden Camera at Cannes. Yet for all its acclaim, the film is so unique, so poetic, and so oddly magical amidst such real conditions, that even those who reject the “artsy” will eat it up.
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” thrives off the powerhouse performance of its 6- year-old star, Quvenzhane Wallis. She plays the equally tough and adorable Hushpuppy, who lays out her mission, and the basic plot, in simple narration: “In a million years, when kids go to school, they’re gonna know that once there was a Hushpuppy and she lived with her daddy in The Bathtub.”
The Bathtub is the loving nickname of her southern delta home, where folks live in third-world conditions on the “wrong side” of a levee. To them, it’s the right side, because it’s all they know. In their eyes, those who live on the dry side are babies. Thus, they ignore calls for evacuation and forgo modern amenities in a self-reliant existence, preferring to be set on fire and sent down a river than to be plugged into a wall at a hospital or nursing home.
The community is metaphorically at world’s end, where adults tell children doomsday scenarios of the South Pole melting, unleashing a great flood and freeing prehistoric beasts known as Aurochs. As Hushpuppy says, “If it weren’t for the Ice Age, I wouldn’t even be Hushpuppy. I’d be breakfast.”
The fantasy creatures are clearly the stuff of child imagination, and there is no insistence that these mythical beasts actually exist. They’re the tall tales we believe as kids, inspiring our actions and shaping our growth. In truth, they’re simply a metaphor for her own growth into a “beast,” whether she can learn to stare down the childish fears of her youth.
Hushpuppy’s “coming of age” journey hinges on two primal urges: searching for her long-lost mother and coming to terms with her father.
The former is a quest for identity, seeking a mother so hot she never had to light the stove; the water would boil on its own. This mother left when Hushpuppy was a child, and now the young girl talks to a knockoff Michael Jordan jersey with her mother’s face drawn on top, like Tom Hanks’ Wilson volleyball.
The latter is a quest for acceptance by her intense father, Wink (Dwight Henry), an ailing alcoholic with a mysterious disease, but whose love for his daughter is never in doubt. He expresses it with such simple acts as strapping on water wings as a storm approaches, or challenging her to an arm-wrestling contest and screaming, “Who’s the man?” to which she yells, “I’m the man!”
We Chesapeake Bay folks may connect most with a crab feast scene, where Wink tells Hushpuppy to skip the traditional way of picking a crab and eat it like a beast. With the entire room chanting “beast it,” she rips the crab in half, sucks out the insides, and stands on the table, fists clenched and roaring.
She is the beast of the southern wild.
Wallis’ tour-de-force performance should go down among the great child performances in history, from Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet” (1944) to Haley Joel Osment in “The Sixth Sense” (1999).
I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s nominated for an Oscar, but unlike Anna Paquin’s Best Supporting Actress win for “The Piano” (1993), Wallis will be competing for Best Actress. If the Academy gives the statue to a 6-year-old over its older leading ladies, I’d be pleasantly and beautifully shocked.
“She was so focused and poised and just was fierce,” director Benh Zeitlin tells IMDB. “She wouldn’t do just what I told her to do. She questioned what I was saying. She’d say, ‘I don’t like this word,’ and she’d delete it. I allowed her to own the words and understand what they meant.”
The film is Zeitlin’s feature-length debut, receiving support from the Sundance Labs and the NHK International Filmmakers Award. His vision is gritty and hand- held with high exposure, the work of cinematographer Ben Richardson, who won the Cinematography Award at Sundance. The film’s childlike wonder may feel as real as it does because Zeitlin met his co-writer Lucy Alibar in a summer camp as teenagers. He also knows a thing or two about overcoming adversity, having suffered a shattered hip and dislocated pelvis in a car accident on the way to the South by Southwest in 2008.
Shot on actual post-Katrina locations with non-actors, “Beasts” follows the Italian Neorealist approach of shooting in real places and casting real people without Hollywood glitz, glamor and effects. Hushpuppy and her father might as well have been the father and son in “Bicycle Thieves” (1948), two non-actors giving incredibly real performances. What a treat to nail both ends of the film spectrum in back to back weeks, last week seeing Hollywood popcorn moviemaking at its best with “The Dark Knight Rises,” and this week seeing gritty independent filmmaking at its finest in “Beasts.”
Both will undoubtedly be on many “Best of 2012” lists at the end of the year. Like “The Artist” last year, “Beasts” is still waiting to get its full, nationwide release, but you can catch it at a handful of local theaters. In Maryland, head to the Landmark Bethesda Row in Bethesda or the AFI Silver in Silver Spring. In Virginia, head to the AMC Lowes Shirlington 7 in Arlington. And in D.C., head to the Landmark E Street Cinema near Metro Center. Despite its young central performance, the film is PG-13 for some strong language and “life and death” scenarios. My advice would be to see it once yourself before taking the kids. If you think they can handle it, glue their butts to the seats.
Tightly constructed with a bit of magic in each scene, the 1 1/2 hour runtime will fly by. I lost myself in it, and by the end, I was wiping my eyes as Hushpuppy said, “Don’t cry,” with a single tear down her own cheek. As the music swelled and the end credits hit, I recalled Hushpuppy’s words, spoken with the allegorical weight of Linda Manz in “Days of Heaven” (1978): “The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece… the whole universe will get busted.” I feel the same way about this film. If one piece busted, even the smallest piece, the entire whole may not have worked. Thankfully, everything in the film’s universe fits together just right.
★ ★ ★ ★
The above rating is based on a 4-star scale. Read more from WTOP Film Critic Jason Fraley by clicking “Fraley on Film” under the “Living” tab above, following @JasonFraleyWTOP on Twitter, and checking out his blog, The Film Spectrum.
(Copyright 2012 by WTOP. All Rights Reserved.)
