The Kid with a Bike

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne won their fourth major Cannes prize with The Kid with a Bike (2011), sharing the Grand Prix. It is a characteristically spare drama of a child in crisis, and among the most accessible and emotionally direct films the Belgian brothers have made. There are even brief passages of musical score, in a body of work that is usually silent.

Newcomer Thomas Doret plays Cyril, the boy whose furious search for his absent father drives every scene, with Cécile de France as Samantha, the hairdresser who takes him in for reasons the film never over-explains. The Dardennes shoot in their familiar present-tense, handheld style, staying close to the restless child as he careens between hope and self-destruction. Samantha's patience, set against the boy's volatility and the pull of a local delinquent, gives the film the shape of a modern fairy tale, though it is shot and played with none of a fairy tale's softness.

Critics praised its compassion and its restraint, and de France's warm, unshowy performance was widely admired. The Kid with a Bike distils the Dardennes' humanism into the story of a single damaged boy and the woman who takes him on, and those few bars of music give it an almost fairy-tale grace. Within one of contemporary cinema's most consistent bodies of work, it is among the most moving and the most emotionally direct of their films.