L'Enfant (The Child): Critic Reviews

Unlike the great foreign films of old, L'Enfant makes catharsis look easy.

What interests the Dardennes ... is not only how Bruno became the kind of man who would sell a child as casually as a slab of beef, but also whether a man like this, having committed such a repellent offense, can find redemption.

An example of how cinema has the power to convince, to move and to compel with the fewest possible material resources.

Like all the Dardennes' films, L'Enfant is a vivid, Dickensian report from the most dispossessed precincts of society.

Without a lot of overheated action, the consequences of Bruno's behavior cloud the next few hours of his life. The character is a surprise as both a dramatic creation and a human being.

The remarkable thing about the Dardennes is their complex single-mindedness. Each film is an odyssey (toward grace?) in a world that could hardly seem more material.

This is a movie about the kind of everyday miracle we all need to believe can happen -- how the tiniest glimmer of human connection can lead the most miserable specimen out of darkness.

Even for a useless criminal, Bruno is just not a compelling personality. Unreadable lumps generally aren't.

Deceptively simple, stripped to the bare necessities, it quietly dramatizes the consequences of lying, cheating and stealing in a way that takes your intelligence for granted.

A gritty slice of real life, relentlessly in focus, though always humane.

Every act in the film has a mythic resonance.

Viewers in Europe have swooned, it is said, at this movie's painful inching toward redemption. Against that, I have to report a slow drip of disappointment.

Here is a film where God does not intervene and the directors do not mistake themselves for God. It makes the solutions at the ends of other pictures seem like child's play.

The film belongs to Jeremie Renier and Deborah Francois.

Belgian filmmakers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne are masters of naturalistic drama in which characters reveal themselves through a grimace or a gesture, rather than artfully scripted speeches.

What is astonishing, and most admirable, is the way the filmmakers manage to create sympathy for this pathetic loser.

A sad social commentary in the style of Robert Bresson.

Those masters of small-scale realism, Belgian brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, have created yet another beautifully acted, exquisitely observed morality tale.

It's expertly directed in a low-key, naturalistic way that brings to mind French auteur Robert Bresson. It's also emotionally forceful and contains heartbreaking performances by Jeremie Renier as Bruno and Deborah Francois as Sonia.

A simple moral fable told with compassion and nerve.

Bruno is a classic character from the pen of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, the Belgian filmmakers who find beauty and redemption in the direst of circumstances.

The miracle of the filmmakers' work would seem to be the perfectly struck performances of the leads.

Bland and predictable.

L'Enfant is a forceful, impassioned and unsparing triumph from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne.

The exceptional thing about L'Enfant is how intensely dramatic the film makes the consequences of Bruno's choice.