It’s an ancient truism of comedy that what makes us most uncomfortable and shocks us the most is also where the deepest veins of humor reside, and throughout his career Baron Cohen has specialized in prodding those sore spots, sometimes with an evident political point of view, and sometimes totally not. In a throwaway moment early in Baron Cohen’s new movie, “The Dictator” (directed by Baron Cohen’s frequent collaborator Larry Charles, who was also at the helm for “Borat” and “Brüno”), we see the bearded North African tyrant Admiral General Aladeen, portrayed of course by Baron Cohen, playing a first-person-shooter video game called “Munich Olympics.” You’re groaning already, right? Here’s how it works: You knock on the door marked “Israeli Olympic Team.” When a cute little Smurf-like creature in a yarmulke and side-curls answers the door — “Shalom!” — a pop-up widget announces “Shoot the Jew!” and you waste him. It continues from there: “Oy vey!” “Mazeltov!” “Meshugenah!” cry the cheerfully dying figures.

This is funny precisely because it’s not funny, and if that sounds too mystical or dialectical for you, let’s remember that we’re talking about a guy who has cited World War II-era historian Ian Kershaw, who was one of his professors at Cambridge, as a major influence. “I know it’s not very funny being a comedian talking about the Holocaust,” Baron Cohen once told Rolling Stone interviewer Neil Strauss, while making it clear that in exposing the casual cruelty and docile conformity of the ordinary people with whom he interacted he was doing exactly that. You can argue there’s a personal agenda at work here, since Baron Cohen grew up in a prominent British Jewish family and is the grandson of a Holocaust survivor (in his words, the last Jewish girl trained as a ballerina in Nazi Germany). But I see something more than that, a dark and even misanthropic moral and intellectual vision that conceals, somewhere way deep down, the smothered hope for a better world.

We laugh at the “Munich Olympics” video game (if, indeed, we do laugh) because we’re appalled and we see some truth in it. We’re appalled that Baron Cohen and his co-writers were malicious enough to come up with it, we’re appalled with ourselves for so readily accepting it as humor, and we’re appalled by the incontrovertible fact that some people — in places like Aladeen’s fictional homeland, the Republic of Wadiya, but also in Britain and the U.S. and anywhere else you care to mention — would take smirking delight in such a game if it existed. (Which, for all I know, it may.)

“The Dictator” is a much more normal kind of movie than “Borat” or “Brüno,” perhaps because Baron Cohen is now too famous — and has been threatened too many times with lawsuits and/or beatdowns — to pull off his in-character performance provocations. (Frankly, hadn’t the shtick worn out by the time of the very mixed “Brüno” anyway?) Despite some cleverly snipped bits of real news footage from the Libyan crisis, “The Dictator” is a scripted entertainment from start to finish, with Baron Cohen playing both the vainglorious and idiotic Wadiyan autocrat and also the even dumber rural goatherd selected to serve as his assassination-thwarting double. On a trip to New York to address the United Nations, the real Aladeen gets separated from his entourage, thanks to an incompetent CIA blowhard played by John C. Reilly. Shorn of his beard and of his access to voluptuous hookers and anti-Semitic video games, the erstwhile dictator is forced to work in a feminist food collective in Brooklyn, where he falls hard for Anna Faris, as its unshaven-armpit, pixie-cut sporting, ultra-p.c. manager. (Aladeen repeatedly remarks that she has the physique of a preteen boy — and specifically of Harry Potter — but it’s not clear whether that’s a bad thing.)

Although the character of Aladeen seems awfully predictable by Baron Cohen standards, the movie itself veers from one hilarious, absurd and patently offensive setup to the next, mercilessly mocking the stupidity and paranoia of Americans, the venality of celebrities — there’s a joke about Katy Perry’s purported relations with Aladeen that I can’t even euphemize successfully — the Chinese lust for world domination and the cultural vapidity and backwardness of the Arab world. There are moments of unabated vulgar silliness, as when a rich woman gazing out the window of a Manhattan luxury hotel gets an unexpected faceful of wobbly Aladeen dong. And there are even moments when Baron Cohen’s portrayal of the benighted dictator — who is perhaps more ignorant and miseducated than innately evil — borders on sweetness, if you can really use that word to describe a film that involves jokes about rape, torture, abortion and fellatio performed with a geriatric drug dealer’s severed head.

But let’s revert to my original WTF question about Baron Cohen by way of this film’s obvious relationship to Charlie Chaplin’s 1940 “The Great Dictator,” which is also about a demented world leader with genocidal fantasies and the ordinary citizen (in Chaplin’s film, a Jewish barber) who becomes his accidental replacement. On one level, of course, the comparison is ridiculous. Chaplin’s film is a masterpiece, or something close to it — prescient, daring and almost unbearably tragic, an optimistic and sentimental plea for reason in a world teetering on the edge of the abyss. Remember that when that film was released, the U.S. and Germany were not yet at war and the worst atrocities of the Holocaust had not yet happened, although the film seems to see them coming.

I can’t resist feeling that “The Dictator” (whose screenplay is credited to Alec Berg, David Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, along with Baron Cohen) restages Chaplin’s great farce in a darker and more vulgar register, to reflect a world that has been fundamentally poisoned, not just by Hitler’s crimes but by decades of subsequent mendacity and hypocrisy. I shouldn’t spoil Aladeen’s climactic speech, in which he praises the many virtues of dictatorship (which the Western world has so foolishly left behind), except to say that it’s a brilliant, sardonic response to the paean to progress and democracy delivered by Chaplin’s barber in the guise of the dictator Hynkel — and that its targets are you and me, not the known tyrants and despots of the Arab world. “We are coming into a new world, a kindlier world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed and brutality,” Chaplin’s character tells the world. There are good reasons to suspect that Baron Cohen, who spent his teen years active in the Zionist-socialist youth organization Habonim Dror (which advocates peace between Israel and its neighbors), is a lefty somewhere deep down. But the new world without hate, greed and brutality — nuh-uh, he’s heard that one before.

Among the 22 films in competition, there’s a particularly large American contingent, starting with the opening night film, Wes Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom.” The movie about adolescent love on the run brings a few new actors (Bruce Willis, Edward Norton) into Anderson’s carefully orchestrated world.

Later, there’s David Cronenberg’s Don DeLillo adaptation “Cosmopolis,” starring Robert Pattinson, and Walter Salles’ (“The Motorcycle Diaries”) anticipated adaptation of Jack Kerouac’s beloved “On the Road.” That film, produced by Francis Ford Coppola, stars Sam Riley and Garrett Hedlund, but has attracted more attention for its supporting roles, including Pattinson’s “Twilight” co-star Kristen Stewart as Dean Moriarty’s girlfriend.

There’s also John Hillcoat’s “Lawless,” a Prohibition-era bootlegging tale starring Shia LaBeouf and Tom Hardy, and Andrew Dominick’s “Killing Them Softly,” a crime film starring Pitt as a Mob enforcer. The unusually large U.S. group is rounded out by Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” with Matthew McConaughey and Reese Witherspoon, and Lee Daniels’ “Precious” follow up, “The Paperboy,” a death row drama starring McConaughey, Zac Efron and Kidman.

“The Americans are coming!” heralds Daniels, whose “Precious” screened in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard section.

That echoes the same sentiment of Cannes’ artistic director Thierry Fremaux, who declared America cinema “back in full force” when announcing the lineup.

For Daniels, the festival is a comfortable place to premiere his latest.

“We get so caught up, as Americans, in a specific type of film experience that we forget that this is a small fraction of what cinema is about,” he says. “It’s OK to be odd. I remember when I was doing ‘Precious,’ everybody looking at me and scratching their heads like, ‘What are you doing, really?’ I remember feeling that I was odd, and I don’t feel odd at Cannes.”

Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” last won the festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, the first American film to do so since Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11″ in 2004. Although the French silent film ode “The Artist” was bested by “Tree of Life” at Cannes, it went on to win best picture at the Academy Awards.

“The Artist” had been picked up for U.S. distribution ahead of Cannes by Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Co. will release “Lawless” and “Killing Them Softly” this fall. He’s frequently used Cannes as a place to both acquire and launch films.

“Cannes is a worldwide arena,” says Weinstein. “It’s just a great opportunity to launch something. The worldwide press is there and it commands worldwide attention. You get such a difference of opinion, and when it comes together as a consensus, you can really launch a movie like we did ‘The Artist’ last year.”

Several films in competition will be looking for distribution, and some have already found it. “On the Road” was last week acquired by IFC Films and Sundance Selects with plans for a release late this year. In deals signed in hotel rooms and aboard yachts, many other films in various stages of production will be bought and sold. After a robust market in 2011, Weinstein — “a buyer and a seller” this year, he says — describes this year’s market as “maybe stronger.”

Other films will seek to benefit from the global convergence of media, like the upcoming DreamWorks animation blockbuster “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” which will screen out of competition, and “The Dictator,” for which Sacha Baron Cohen is expected to make an in-character promotional appearance on the waterfront Wednesday. The festival will also host a fundraiser for several Haiti charities, including Sean Penn’s.

Whereas Penn and Pitt are familiar favorites at Cannes, this year’s festival includes a new crop of young actors seeking more adventurous work, including LaBeouf, Efron and Pattinson.

“When you fantasize about how the world views you as an actor, you’re like, ‘I want to be recognized at Cannes,’” says Pattinson, who has drawn high compliments from his director, Cronenberg, for his performance in “Cosmopolis.”

Pattinson has previously been to Cannes to promote the “Twilight” film “New Moon” in 2009, but he’s clearly thrilled to be a part of the main slate.

“Hopefully, people don’t hate it,” he says, alluding to Cannes’ famously vocal audiences.

Newcomers, though, are outnumbered by veterans this year. More than two-thirds of the directors with films in competition have previously had films at the festival.

There are no women directors in competition this year, after four last year — an outcome that the feminist group La Barbe has condemned in an online petition.

Haneke, the Austrian director who won the Palme d’Or for “The White Ribbon” in 2009, returns with “Amour,” about an octogenarian couple. The British filmmaker Ken Loach, winner of the Palme in 2006 for “The Wind That Shakes the Barley,” is back with “The Angels’ Share” — atypically for Loach, a comedy. The Iranian master Kiarostami, whose “Taste of Cherry” won the Palme in 1997, has the Tokyo drama “Like Someone in Love.”

That also leaves international heavyweights Jacques Audiard (“Rust and Bone”), Cristian Mungiu (“Beyond the Hills”), Matteo Garrone (“Reality”), Hong Sang-soo (“In Another Country,” Carlos Reygadas (“Post Tenebras Lux”) and the 89-year-old Alain Resnais (“You Haven’t Seen Anything Yet”).

Several of the American films are international collaborations, helmed by filmmakers from Brazil (Salles), New Zealand (Dominik) and Australia (Hillcoat).

At Cannes, the context is always macro: all the world, all of cinema.

“It’s great to have an American genre film in that kind of arena, where what you’re coming to do is just share storytelling and the love of filmmaking as opposed to national boundaries,” says Hillcoat. “That’s what’s really exciting about Cannes.”

Take a minute to walk to your limousine in my Gucci shoes, and you’ll realize that I’m just trying to make people smile. Mickey Rooney with buckteeth and a crazy accent in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”? It’s so much funnier than finding a real Chinese actor just talking like himself. Then you’d have to get a screenwriter to actually write genuinely funny lines for that character. You get so much more comedy bang with buckteeth and a funny accent. I mean, it made me laugh. Many people, including myself, were also convinced that Charlton Heston truly was a Mexican/Native American/Egyptian/Ape who talked to God. And I think I convinced a lot of Asians that Genghis Khan really did look like John Wayne back in the ’60s. “Short Circuit” was one of my biggest hit movies and I was completely convinced that Fisher Stevens was Indian. Who knew he was a Jewish guy from New York? That accent was spot on!

My point is, I’m not the bad guy. I’m just the rich guy. When you look at it through my studio executive lens, you understand how important it is that both white people and non-white people believe that Indians, Asians, Mexicans and Arabs are truly just white people in brown makeup. I don’t like thinking that way. I just don’t have the luxury not to. I’m a businessman. White people spend more money on shit than anyone else. (Except on fast food, which is mostly blacks and Mexicans … at least that’s what I have heard. I’m a vegan.) So hey, non-Caucasians, stop buying tacos and start buying Cadillacs.

White people are also cheaper to light than dark-skinned people, and just so you know, you the moviegoer end up paying for that extra cost. Sometimes it’s just too unbelievable to cast an ethnic actor. I turned away a lovely Indian actress once who auditioned for the role of a hobbit. I mean there are no Indian hobbits. Audiences would never believe that.

Now, look: I am trying to do the right thing. America has changed and Hollywood should attempt to portray a truer depiction of the ethnic diversity that makes up this country. The fact that many television shows now hire a certain percentage of non-white actors is a step in the right direction, right? I am even prepared to make a deal with you ethnic people out there. Every time you let me cast a non-Caucasian character with a Caucasian actor, I will give you two or three non-white actors in smaller supporting roles. Why not lead roles? Because I’m trying to make a living here. I have spent a lot of time and money throughout history convincing everyone that white is normal. I have even convinced non-white people that white is better, prettier, smarter, stronger, and that only white people can truly be the heroes. Everyone has bought into it, and now you want me to just abandon all my hard work? OK, I will make an exception for some of you non-whites: If you are a hot Latina, you can be the lead. Why? Because white guys want to fuck Jennifer Lopez.

Here are a few more key elements to remember when watching a movie the way white people have been programmed to react. Laugh at the funny accents, because they are funny. Ignore the source material; I’m making movies, I don’t give a shit about staying true to your comic books. And … hold on! Why the fuck is Idris Elba playing a Norse God!?

To view a slide show of Hollywood’s egregious moments in white-washing, click on the link below — and share your own most memorable moments in the comments. (Slide show by Max Rivlin-Nadler)

View the slide show

Six months later, “John Carter” became one of the costliest flops in Hollywood history, and while the film may have its redeeming qualities, story structure isn’t among them. Read in retrospect, the Stanton profile now seems laden with irony, and it isn’t alone: A striking number of recent New Yorker features on movie directors and actors have been followed by embarrassing setbacks for the artists in question, usually involving the very projects that the articles are extolling.

In other words, whenever a New Yorker profile shows a director hard at work in the editing room, the studio should start to worry. Since the beginning of 2010, the magazine has published eight features on artists best known for their work in film. Two are profiles of Clint Eastwood and Jane Fonda that are basically career retrospectives. Of the remaining six, five of their subjects — Steve Carell, Guillermo del Toro, Anna Faris, John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton  — experienced significant professional reversals soon after the articles appeared. And while I’ll discuss the one exception in a moment, such a dire track record might well give pause to Armando Iannucci, the British director of “In the Loop,” who was profiled by the magazine in March.

To put it mildly, there’s something of a New Yorker feature curse going around Hollywood these days. It doesn’t always hold true — Dana Goodyear’s profile of James Cameron certainly didn’t hurt “Avatar” — but when it does, the results can be startling, especially when you set the articles alongside the films they so effusively describe. Tad Friend’s profile of Steve Carell, for instance, portrays its subject as “a brilliant piece of software, a 2.0 fix for the problem of unfunny comedy,” whose approach to collaboration is nothing less than “a painstaking set of procedures aimed at maximum creativity.” The result? “Dinner for Schmucks,” a critical and commercial nonevent that few would hold up as a model of “the golden age of improvisation.”

Other profiles read even more strangely in hindsight. Last May, the film “Bridesmaids” had everyone talking about the role of women in modern comedy, a topic that Friend addressed in a lengthy feature published the month before. “What’s at stake is not merely a tenable marketplace for ‘hard’ female comedies,” he writes, “but a fresh vantage on romance and, perhaps, a fresh way of seeing men and women.” Unfortunately, he isn’t talking about “Bridesmaids,” but about Anna Faris in “What’s Your Number?,” which came out in September and promptly sank like a stone.

I don’t mean to pick on Tad Friend, a fine and perceptive writer, because he certainly isn’t alone. I first noticed the phenomenon in an article on Tony Gilroy by D.T. Max, who glowingly describes the creative process behind the underwhelming “Duplicity.” More recently, Guillermo del Toro had the curse hit him twice, first during the writing of a profile by features editor Daniel Zalewski, which coincided with del Toro’s departure from “The Hobbit,” and shortly after the piece appeared, when Universal passed on “At the Mountains of Madness.” These articles are invariably graceful, smart,and insightful — and their subjects are all talented. Yet there’s no shaking the sense that such a feature rarely bodes well for the future.

Sports fans have talked for decades about a Sports Illustrated jinx, in which a player’s cover appearance seems to lead to a string of unusual bad luck. The reason for the jinx, if it exists, isn’t hard to understand: Athletes generally make the cover after an exceptional performance, which is right when they often regress to the mean. The New Yorker doesn’t put stars on the cover, but its features are valuable real estate, so it tends to favor subjects with a big success already behind them. There’s room in the magazine for emerging artists, but it’s in the Brooklyn of the back pages, not the Manhattan of the features section, which prefers seemingly sure things. Much as in Hollywood itself, you can’t get fired for going with last year’s star.

In finance, this is called performance chasing. It means investing in today’s interview subject based on yesterday’s hit movie, which, as an outlier, is often followed by a slump. This is how we get a look behind the scenes of “Duplicity,” not “Michael Clayton,” and it sometimes results in reportage that has a troubling tendency to ignore obvious warning signs. Anthony Lane’s feature on John Lasseter and “Cars 2,” for instance, is written in his characteristically prickly style, but for all his evident cynicism, he never raises a crucial point that many other observers had noted at the time, which was that Pixar was making a sequel to one of its weakest films. In the end, Lane’s skepticism is only skin deep, and it’s ultimately sacrificed to the needs of the narrative, in which the critic is grudgingly won over by the studio’s charms.

Occasionally, of course, the feature section does devote space to an emerging talent, as Rebecca Mead did last year with the director Lena Dunham, before the release of “Tiny Furniture.” (Iannucci can take some comfort from Dunham’s example: Their shows “Veep” and “Girls” were both renewed last week by HBO, one of the few forces around that can reliably beat the curse.) In this article, the exception mentioned above, several elements combine to push it into feature territory — social media, the New York art scene, “the cinema of unexamined privilege” — and the result is a rare instance of a profile catching an artist on the way up. Dunham jumps the queue because her story feeds into fashionable issues, a fact she lightly mocks: “There’s always an article coming out, saying ‘The new thing is funny women.’”

And this gets close to the heart of the problem. Many feature articles — including this one — strive to tie a bow on the story, to tether themselves to some larger theme, a tendency visibly pronounced at the New Yorker, thanks both to its reputation and to the relatively small number of movie features it publishes. At four or so profiles per year, an article can’t just be about Steve Carell or Tony Gilroy or Anna Faris: To justify the use of such premium space, it has to be about the future of comedy, or adult drama, or funny women, which leads to grand claims that can ultimately seem peculiar when we finally see “Dinner for Schmucks.”

“Nobody knows anything,” the writer William Goldman famously said of Hollywood, and if that’s true of filmmakers, it’s doubly true of the journalists who try to draw conclusions about so unpredictable an industry. If journalism is the first draft of history, it’s no surprise that the draft occasionally contains 10 finely reported pages on “What’s Your Number?” But that shouldn’t stop reporters from trying. We desperately need thoughtful articles that go deeper than the average star profile, like Ian Parker’s New Yorker feature from a few years back on George Clooney, which remains one of my favorite pieces ever published in the magazine. It came out the same month, naturally, as “Leatherheads.”

Things are very different today. Kid-targeted movies filled with teenage actors like “The Hunger Games” and the “Harry Potter” franchise have found a huge adult audience, while actors like 15-year-old Chloë Moretz (who stars in the new movie “Hick,” opening this week) and the Fanning sisters are given prominent roles in serious dramas. On TV, children have become a regular part of many casts, from sitcoms (“The Middle,” “Modern Family”) to dramas (“Shameless,” ‘The Walking Dead”). Child actors, once a sign of cheesiness and unprofessional conduct, have become integral to the success of a large number of critically respected and commercially successful entertainment properties. And not only that, many of these child actors have gotten really, really good.

Think of Kodi Smit-McPhee from “The Road,” holding his own next to Viggo Mortensen. Or Emma Kenny’s Debs on “Shameless,” capable of moving from a funny scene — yelling “Eat my ass!” at a video game — to the heartbreaking moments she shares with her unappreciative father, slipping him beer or covering his passed-out body with a blanket without getting any thanks. Or even Aubrey Anderson-Emmons, the new Lily on “Modern Family,” only 4 years old but emphasizing the weirdness rather than the cuteness of the 2-year-old she plays. (When she was cast, other cast members talked about how good of an actress she was, which seemed strange to say about a 4-year-old, but she’s proved it this season.)

The rise of the quality child actor (coming, it should be noted, considerably later than the rise of “quality” TV) can be traced to two general phenomena. One is that scriptwriters and directors figured out how to use child actors effectively, emphasizing a naturalistic style that let them fit in with their costars and lose all the groan-worthy signals that a movie was just for kids. But the other is the emergence of that very parallel entertainment universe. Nickelodeon and Disney didn’t just create hugely successful TV shows and movies; they also created a reason for more and more child actors to come to California, to learn their craft and to be able to fill those new, cheese-free parts.

Why were child actors so reviled throughout the ’80s? Here are some names that might jog your memory: Michelle Tanner. Jennifer Keaton. Willis Jackson. Child actors seemed either designed to run onstage and say something cute to elicit an “awww!” in unison from the studio audience, or to smirk and hack their way through the broad teen comedies filling mall multiplexes. While directors like Stephen Spielberg and John Hughes were able to elicit compelling performances from younger actors, their technique didn’t seem to take and derivatives of their successes seemed to share more with the B-movies of yore than they did with “E.T.” or “The Breakfast Club.” (It didn’t help that a lot of those “kids” were being played by adults, either.)

It’s no surprise, then, that anyone backing a TV show or movie intended to be seen as serious and high-quality would do everything they could to keep kids out of it; even good shows focused on kids couldn’t survive on network TV during the dead zone between the mid-’90s and early ’00s, as “My So-Called Life” and “Freaks and Geeks” could attest. It’s a style of acting we still see today: think poor Jake Lloyd playing young Anakin Skywalker in “The Phantom Menace” in such a cutesy way that it rendered the movie nearly unwatchable. Or most of the actors on Disney and Nick shows, for that matter. (Though at least the kids are playing themselves; previously many “teenagers” were played by adults.)

Sometime during that fallow period, though, producers figured out how to not only capture that Spielberg magic, but even improve on it. There are times (see above, or here) when the acting in Spielberg’s kiddie flicks is so unaffected that it comes close to breaking the fourth wall. Young actors are now placed in fantastic situations (wizard school, vampire wars, Upper East Side prep schools) and expected to convincingly embody a real character — and they’ve become very good at it.

“Over the years, the acting style has changed,” said Harriet Greenspan, a casting agent and acting instructor in Los Angeles who has worked with a number of kids’ shows. “It’s become a lot more real. Thirty years ago, acting was acting. We look for kids that aren’t acting anymore, that are more real.”

The general path of child actors has always been commercials to TV shows to movies, but there was a long-standing block at that second level: There simply weren’t very many TV shows child actors could work on. Most “children’s entertainment” was cartoons or educational programming staffed by adults. Cable changed all that. While the first shows for tweens are generally thought to have aired on NBC during its Saturday-morning block of “Saved by the Bell” and its spinoffs, cable created a venue for kids to watch themselves acting like kids — and, unsurprisingly, it turned out they really liked it. (Cable also created the split, in its way: If the kids were off watching tween shows, “family hour” shows didn’t have to feature cute kids to get the parents to watch.) This marked an important shift in how kids were portrayed.

“Nickelodeon first came up with its ‘Kids Rule’ slogan quite purposefully in the early ’90s,” Dave Moore, a media expert at Temple University, wrote in an email. “This necessarily transformed kid actors from subservient to adult programs to perceived ‘rebels’ acting out against authority.”

Both Disney and Nickelodeon slowly built up universes of programming and stars that spanned media from TV to music to movies, a world with kids playing kids to an audience of kids. The acting there was frequently as broad as you might have seen on any ’80s sitcom, but that wasn’t the important thing. “Child actor” isn’t a career anyone decides to pursue; first you get a gig, and then you make a life of it. The emergence of so many more roles for younger actors created a much larger pool of actors other projects could draw from. By the time a child actor is being asked to play an 8-year-old, he or she is likely to have more experience now than ever before.

“The trend of ‘grooming’ child actors from a young age has probably been facilitated in an age with more media exposure sooner,” Moore noted. But this has not always been a positive development.

“It’s a kids’ world out there,” said Greenspan. “So many families are picking up their lives and moving to California because of their child’s career. Of course, kids get bad advice — they get one role and the parents pack up and move, and sometimes it’s months or years before they get another gig.”

Exploitation has always been a concern when it comes to child actors; while California has strict rules about how long kids are allowed to work per day, it can’t control the bad decisions parents might make when their kid isn’t working. Bogus “talent searches” and managers ostensibly trying to discover the next big child actor or model pop up regularly in cities small and large, and most of these are scams. Nor has the fate of child actors generally been smooth.

All that said, the return of younger characters to mainstream entertainment has been a welcome one. In the last decade, both comedies and dramas have gotten a lot better at showing us adults who are recognizable humans, not just collections of showbiz gestures assembled into a numbing whole. While that sophistication in storytelling techniques was happening, though, children were largely left out, as if adults wouldn’t be interested in seeing compelling portrayals of kids (even as they cropped up in shows like “Malcolm in the Middle” or movies like “The Sixth Sense”). Now, Chloë Moretz can give us a dark comedic take on a character her age while Helena Bonham Carter does the same; Kiernan Shipka shows us how girls like Sally Draper deal with the socio-historical shifts of the ’60s just as Elisabeth Moss does the same for young women; and if Chandler Riggs’ portrayal of Carl on “The Walking Dead” sometimes makes you root for his death, well, he’s right there alongside Dale and Lori. On the children’s shows of Disney and Nickelodeon, kids have been portrayed from their own perspective for the last few decades. Now, adults are getting to see kids as real humans, too.