Since my wife and I started a family within the past five years, I’ve become acutely attuned to the performances of child actors in movies and on TV.  Although I was born a softie, I find myself tearing up a lot more now as a father of two… and not just during scenes of sadness or tragedy.  Sometimes a kid’s performance just nails some aspect of being one in a way that cuts through the treacle and sentimentality of which the movies are so often guilty.  (You know, because we are.)  Here is a handful (let’s just pretend we all have eight fingers) of recent kid performances that wiggled their way into my heart…

Ryan Simpkins contributes a sweet, seemingly unconstructed performance that really complements the family-size weirdness of Jennifer Lynch’s SURVEILLANCE (2008).  I didn’t care for the movie, whose cruelties far outweigh its insights, but director Lynch (David’s kid) really teased out a wonderful performance from this not-even 10 year-old girl.  Encircled by adults who are either blinded to the madness around them or actively contributing to it, Simkins’ guarded Stephanie protects herself and walks through the fire that consumes nearly everyone else.  Ryan went from here to a prominent role in Sam Mendes’ REVOLUTIONARY ROAD (2008) opposite Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet but you may remember better as the voice of a baby sheep in trouble on an episode of THE WONDER PETS a while back.

BEFORE THE FALL (TRES DIAS, 2008) is an atypical end of the world movie, concerned less with pyrotechnic gimcrackery (no national monuments were harmed in the making of this film) than with our relationships to one another as we face our inevitable destruction.  Writer-director F. Javier Gutiérrez complicates matters by folding into the apocalyptic mix a serial killer bent on revenging himself on the family that sent to prison many years earlier.  While that B plot waits to kick in, the film is about the conundrum of dealing with children at a time of no hope.  The adults choose not to let the young ones know that a shower of meteors will bring about the end of mankind in three days and agonize over the natural enthusiasm of children, one of them excited about her birthday in a week’s time.  As the youngest boy, Juan Galván is the quintessential buster; you can smell the sunshine baked into his skin from summer days running in the tall grass.  You ache for him, and with him, as one day yields to the next and the last day yields to the inevitable.

Speaking of the end of the world, Àlex and David Pastor’s CARRIERS (2009) sets a biological rather than an astronomical end date for the world.  As humanity sickens, a small band of the healthful motor across the desert to a coastal destination with the hope of sitting out the plague.  On their way, they meet a father (Christopher Meloni) struggling to get his young daughter (MAD MEN‘s Kiernan Shipka) to a help station allegedly in possession of an effective treatment.  Their story is only a small part of CARRIERS but also the best, most effective part.  Taking a break from playing tough guys or comic foils, Meloni is disarmingly vulnerable as a (now) single father desperate to keep the full weight of the situation from his infected little girl and Kiernan Shipka is unforgettable as a Little Nell for a new but sadly short-lived millennium.  If your heart isn’t broken in half by their final scene together, you don’t have one.

I didn’t care for James Mottern’s TRUCKER (2008) nearly as much as Suzidoll did but I enjoyed the performance of Jimmy Bennett as the bratty 10 year-old son of a footloose long-hauler (Michelle Monaghan).  I think the film is way too formulaic – one might say indielaic – to make its own mark but Bennett more than holds his own as a solid costar.  He’s popped up in some well-regarded movies since (ORPHAN, STAR TREK) but earlier in his career he was the voice of Re-Run van Pelt, kid brother to Lucy and Linus, in the more recent Peanuts cartoons.  Keep your eye on this one – he’s not just good, he’s Alfred Lutter III good.

In Tomas Alfredson’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN (2008),  Lina Leandersson‘s new kid on the block has been, by her own admission, 12 for a really long time.  The brilliance of the then 11-year-old actress’ performance is that you get both a (you should pardon the expression) hard-bitten wisdom far beyond the character’s seeming span of years and a true sense of innocence in all its uncertainty, exhilaration and fear.  The way you approach, accept and then kinda-sorta forget who the character is really is only part of what makes this Swedish sleeper such a joy to watch and to rewatch.

Mason Frank doesn’t get a lot of screen time in Christine Jeffs’ SUNSHINE CLEANING (2008) but what’s there, to quote Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, is cherce.  She plays the kid version of Emily Blunt’s adult no-hoper, who flashes back to that fateful day the course of her life was changed forever.  We watch as the girl and her older sister frolic on an otherwise ordinary summer afternoon in spritz of the front lawn sprinkler while their depressed mother quietly takes her own life offscreen.  Discovering their mother’s body, and with their own world shattered, the girls return to the sprinkler, as if trying to wash away reality, as if trying to turn back the hands of time.

It just may be that the cutest little shit I have ever seen in a movie is entirely computer generated.  This little bugger is one of the alien “prawns” of Neill Blomkamp DISTRICT 9 (2009).  You see him only sporadically, in support of the A-plot, but the guys who married the CGI to the live action did a wonderful job in pantomiming everything that is sprightly and mischievous about a young boy.  Devoted to his (presumably widowed) father and eager to help, this little guy mans up in the film’s frenetic final moments, becoming a bona fide hero, and making even me proud of him.

I actually wasn’t being facetious about the sack-headed little boy from Juan Antonio Bayona’s stately, poignant THE ORPHANAGE (2007), where children not only are the future but the past as well.  Li’l Baghead creeps around in a ghost-like fashion (is he or isn’t he?) and symbolizes not only lost innocence but a child’s natural inclination toward mystery and wonder.  Kids love masks – mine sure do.  And they can be sublimely creepy.  Anybody who has ever woken up out of a sound sleep at o’dark thirty to see their young one standing beside the bed will tell you that for nothing.