Sandra (Marion Cotillard) has a loving husband, Manu (Dardenne regular Fabrizio Rongione), two happy kids, a house, a job, and crippling depression. There’s been a secret ballot at her work (a solar panel factory, where they manufacture a facsimile of the sunshine she lacks), forcing her colleagues to choose between keeping their bonuses, or her job. Sandra wants to give up, but Manu makes her visit each of her co-workers over the titular time period to make a case for clemency. “You’re letting yourself go,” he tells her, kindly, “react instead.”

Reluctantly, she sets out to speak to them, encountering false starts (some simply aren’t in), dignified indignation (“I didn’t vote against you,” one tells her, “I voted for my bonus.”) and the full spectrum of human emotions, all of them earned. To some it’s a practical issue – they need the money – to others it’s a moral one; either way, with Sandra in front of them it’s one that can’t be ignored.

As an ordinary woman on the edge, Cotillard is excellent, the camera rarely leaving her face as she cycles from deep despair to tiny triumphs. Although she takes almost an hour to crack a smile, we’re always invested in Sandra’s plight, and through glimpses of her colleagues’ differing home situations – many of which make hers look charmed – the film becomes more and more engrossing. There’s no music but what plays on the radio, and minimal camera movement. Just real-seeming people talking reasonably and a life, quietly, changed.

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Days are spent looking for his ‘stolen’ bike (his dad sold it), and, indeed, his father, as he inexorably gravitates towards delinquency.

The Kid With A Bike sees Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne ( Rosetta , L’Enfant ) again set the action in their childhood town of Seraing, dealing with working-class protagonists whose everyday travails take on biblical dimensions: crime and punishment, forgiveness and redemption.

It’s the brothers on home turf, but it’s also their brightest film to date. A careful optimism informs the action, while the summer setting allows for atypically warm and colourful photography, with, at times, a fairytale lilt to the social-realism.

Kid is also a film of perpetual motion, the handheld camera tracking Cyril as he scrabbles about town by foot or bike (he gets it back – the clue’s in the title).

Shots of him pedaling like a madman, jacket billowing, locate beauty and liberation amid the supermarkets, housing estates, petrol stations and scrublands, and potentially static dinner-table scenes are energized by a twitching camera and the constant drone of unseen traffic.

Best of all is a foot chase through a patch of woodland: no whip-pans, no swooping cameras, yet more suspense than Michael Bay could ever muster.

Longtime connoisseurs of capturing naturalistic, mesmerising turns from non-actors, the sibling filmmakers tease enough out of Doret – anguish, confusion, hope, fear, hate, love – to carry their film.

Renier, a Dardennes regular, fleetingly but ably supports him, while de France conveys tremendous emotion with a single kiss to the top of his head.

As ever with the Dardennes, this is a film devoid of sentiment and melodrama that is all the more vital and compassionate for it.

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