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Premiering at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival where it went home empty handed from the Jane Campion headed jury, Belgian directing duo Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne continue their more recent trend of working with critically acclaimed French actresses, concocting one of their most emotionally potent titles to date, Two Days, One Night. Star Marion Cotillard would lose twice to American actress Julianne Moore in the international awards area, who trumped her at Cannes for Maps to the Stars and at the Academy Awards for Still Alice. Still, it’s an increasingly intense boil of a performance, ranging from quiet desperation to an act of selfless defiance that will transcend the trappings of any such contemporary award recognition.

Married and a mother of two, Sandra (Cotillard) has recently returned to work after a period of sick leave following a bout of depression. In her absence, management at Solwal, a local solar panel company,...

Who knew that a simple premise with all the usual Dardennes Bros. trimmings and trinkets could receive such a favourable critical response? The Cannes V.I.P jacket wearing Belgium duo grab fellow countrymen Cécile de France and elite club member in the Dardenne camp in Jérémie Renier to portray the duel nature of society and our responsibility towards children/those less fortunate with The Kid With a Bike. The young Thomas Doret joins the rankings in Émilie Dequenne (Rosetta), Morgan Marinne (The Son) and Renier himself from La Promesse as a child who has slipped through the cracks, but finds someone to break his fall. Less school of hard knocks as in the majority of their films, it's an encouraging message about how collectively society should be held accountable for its actions. I speak for myself, but I think this is a stronger film than their Palme d'Or winning L'enfant.

"Synecdoche, New York" is the best film of the decade. It intends no less than to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives. After beginning my first viewing in confusion, I began to glimpse its purpose and by the end was eager to see it again, then once again, and I am not finished. Charlie Kaufman understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

The mind is a concern in all his screenplays, but in "Synecdoche" (2008), his first film as a director, he makes it his subject, and what huge ambition that demonstrates. He's like a

novelist who wants to get it all into the first book in case he never publishes another.

See pics from the film directed and written by Directed by Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. In the cast are Arta Dobroshi, Jérémie Renier, Fabrizio Rongione, Alban Ukaj and Morgan Marinne. This is the winner of the Best Screenplay Award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival as well as an Official Selection 2008 Toronto International Cannes Film Festival. Dobroshi takes the title character role as a young Albanian woman residing in Belgium. Her aim is to start a snack bar with Sokol (played by Alban Ukaj), her boyfriend. As a means to an end, she finds herself playing an accomplice to Favio (Fabrizio Rongione), a mobster with a diabolical plan...