For this week’s “Movies” List, which I first counted down this afternoon on The Chris Vernon Show, I did the best films featuring lead performances by young children. This topic is based on the indie sensation Beasts of the Southern Wild, which opened in Memphis last week (my review here) and which boasts a very strong central performance from Quvenshané Wallis.
Wallis was five or six years old when Beasts was filmed, so, with that in mind, I limited myself here to performers who were 10 or younger when the movies were shot. Middle-schoolers and teens can have their day another time.
The list:
5. Ponette (1996): Four-year-old Victoire Thivisol plays the title role as a girl trying to make sense of her mother’s death through her interactions with her father, her aunt, her young cousins, and her school mates. I haven’t seen this since it’s 1996 release, so I’m not sure how well it holds up, but I remember it as an unusual, wrenching, but non-exploitative experience.
