Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Rosetta (1999)

Rosetta (Émilie Dequenne), 18, loses her job after her trial period ends. She lives in a trailer park in Belgium with her alcoholic mother (Anne Yernaux) who prostitutes herself. Described in this superb film is not only the grimness of the day-to-day life of people close to the bottom of the heap but the sheer resiliance as Rosetta traps fish in a bottle and tries to find other work. She makes friends with Riquet (Fabrizio Rongione) who works on a waffle stand and works for his boss (played by Olivier Gourmet) for a few days and tries to find more work with him.

Separately both Rosetta and Riquet fall into the water, recalling the Dardenne's L'Enfant, and the sounds of their breathing, with no background music, form a backcloth to the action, emphasising the endurance that is their lives.

As Riquet is robbing the boss, Rosetta grasses him up, he's sacked and Rosetta takes his place. Riquet then frightens her by chasing her around on his moped. Later she has to pick her drunken mother up and drags her to bed and is lugging a gas container back to the caravan while Riquet corners her. She looks desperate, tearful and without hope. A film of staggering bleakness.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's L'Enfant | The Child (1996)

The Dardenne brothers' L'Enfant is again set in a bleak Seraing, Liège, with its social problems. Essentially it's a tale of (non)-working-class woe starring twenty-year-old Bruno (Jérémie Renier) and eighteen-year-old Sonia (Déborah François). Bruno gets by on petty theft, using the young schoolboy Steve (Jérémie Ségard) as his accomplice. The couple have a four-month-old baby.

Bruno clearly hasn't grown up: he plays at putting his foot in a puddle to leave a mark on a wall by seeing how far he can jump up it, murders time by playing with a stick in the water, etc. And then he decides to secretly sell the baby, until he tells Sonia what he's done, she faints and has to be rushed to hospital: cue for Bruno to return and reclaim the baby.

All the events are played out against this bleak backdrop, the film bereft of music, actions being repeated quite a lot as if to underline the grimness: desperate phone calls, waiting, making bus journeys and so on. As in Le Fils (in which Renier also stars) any physical effort, the strains and the panting, is heard.

And then the problems begin: Steve grabs an elderly woman's handbag and they whiz off on Steve's moped, although a car follows them and they're forced to hide in the water. And then a change begins to take place when Steve is frozen and Bruno goes to great pains to rub the younger boy's feet and legs: it's almost as if Bruno is at last learning to be a father.

Bruno's transformation as a responsible human being continues when Steve is arrested and Bruno turns himself in to the police, handing in the money he's stolen. And Sonia, who had formerly rejected Bruno, goes to see him in prison and they both break down crying over the futility of it all. It's hardly an upbeat ending, but it shows a strong enough element of promise that the Dardennes like to sign their films off with.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's La Promesse | The Promise (1996)

Unsurprisingly, La Promesse is a social drama from the frères Dardenne set in Seraing, Liège. Igor (Jérémie Renier) is seventeen and works for his father Roger (Olivier Gourmet), who is exploiting immigrant workers: this is a world of usury, blackmail, theft and violence. And then, soon after the business has taken in a group of immigrants on a car carrier, African worker Amidou (Rasmané Ouédraogo) has a fatal fall and Igor promises before he dies that he will look after his wife Assita (Assita Ouedraogo) and her baby.

We first saw Igor looking at a customer's car and then surreptitiously robbing her, but here begins Igor's adulthood, and his moral education: the future of two individuals, both unaware that the father is dead, is in his hands. Igor, his promise made, goes out of his way to help Assita: paying for her housing, humiliating his father. We have seen here how Assita is subjected to racism by being pissed on, but Igor even sells his ring (showing his pact with his father) to help Assita, who becomes a kind of mother figure he looks after. 

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's Le Fils | The Son (2002)

Le Fils has very few characters, very little language, and no soundtrack. But its austerity never makes it boring, it is always gripping, full of suspense, in fact a remarkable film by the remarkable Dardenne brothers, mainly set as ususal in Seraing, Liège, Belgium. In its spartan way, I'd even call it a psychological thriller.

Olivier (Olivier Gourmet) is a carpenter who works in a rehabilitation centre for past offenders and we are surrounded by wood, we learn about wood as Olivier's students learn about wood: they have books which tell them how to identify different kinds, and they carry fold-up measures that they carry in a slot pocket in their overalls.

And then one day Francis (Morgan Marinne) comes to join the team, although for some reason Olivier doesn't initially want to accept him as a member of his class, but agrees a little later. But his behaviour towards Francis is cold, unlike the others he doesn't name him, although he is thorough and teaches him the skills required. Nevertheless he eyes him all the time suspiciously, even 'borrows' his keys to secretly visit his flat, lie on his bed as if trying to put himself in Francis's position. It may even cross the viewer's mind that there is something sexual behind his motives, wonder in what way his bizarre actions are, if at all, linked to his separation from his wife.

Meanwhile Francis seems to be growingly attached to Olivier, following his instructions, finding out how much he knows about measurements. During a long ride in Olivier's car to collect some wood from a warehouse Olivier questions Francis about his long detention, they buy patisseries from a shop but Olivier brusquely insists that they pay separately, they go to a café where Olivier drinks a coffee and Francis a coke. The scene where they play table football in the café is in retrospect almost surreal.

At the warehouse Olivier questions Francis on the identity of a few woods, and eventually tells him that Francis is the killer of his son. The viewer has seen the build-up to this moment, realises why Olivier has been watching Francis so strangely and so intensely, realises that the man is broken, his life destroyed by the death of his child. We have watched his meticulous work with wood, we have watched his meticulous washing of his sandwich box, and now we watch as he hunts down Francis, who after learning that he killed Olivier's son runs and hides in the warehouse of wood, as if he can escape from his past.

After a chase in the warehouse, between the different woods in the warehouse, Francis runs out and is caught by Olivier, and the film captures his breathlessness, which seems to match the hopelessness. He can, and wants, to strangle Francis, but doesn't. He leaves him, but Francis returns to help him load the wood into the trailer.

Devastating. What director needs to spend millions to get people to be entranced by such dramas?

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Deux jours, une nuit | Two Days, One Night (1995)

This is another gritty, realistic movie with a strong social interest from Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne set of course in Seraing, Belgium. Their work in many respects strongly resembles that of Ken Loach.

Here we have the married Sandra (Marion Cotillard) battling with work problems. She's a worker for a solar power panel business who's been off work with depression, during which time her boss has re-organised the work schedule, meaning that the workers have to choose between receiving a bonus and Sandra keeping her job.

Under pressure of the foreman, the workers have provisionally voted against Sandra, although Juliette (Catherine Salée) has obtained a stay of execution until a concluding vote on Monday: Sandra has just a weekend in which to muster support.

And most of the film involves Sandra trying to gather support, often in trying circumstances: amongst the definite there are the definitely against, those who are precarious financially, she even indirectly causes violence in working for her cause, but in the end she only just loses, which is strangely encouraging.

Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne's Le Gamin au vélo | The Kid with a Bike (2011)

Le Gamin au vélo (The Kid with a Bike) perhaps immediately calls to mind Vittorio De Sica's neo-realist Ladri di biciclette (Bicycle Thieves) (1948), although I'm reminded far more of Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist.

The film is set in a rather bleak Seraing in Belgium. Cyril Catoul (Thomas Doret) is an unruly eleven- or twelve-year-old in a children's home who is desperately seeking his father. By chance Samantha (Cécile de France), a youngish hairdresser (and the modern equivalent of Mr Brownlow) begins to foster him. But after learning that his father has rejected him, Cyril soon falls into the clutches of Wes (Egon di Mateo), the Fagin-type father figure who teaches him to steal. After a rather unconvincing botched robbery in which Cyril knocks a father and son out in unintended cartoon fashion (and with which Luc Dardenne finds some similarity to Raskolnikov's actions in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment), he finally recognises Samantha as a substitute mother and seems to be moving toward a kind of happiness with her.

Bearing in mind the subject matter, this could have turned dangerously sentimental but with the Dardenne brothers handling it that problem is avoided.