Kid With a Bike – 7.5

A riveting psychological portrayal of a troubled 11-year-old boy, coming to grips with the loss of his father and, on occasion, his bike. He moves from sullen outcast to a slightly willing sharer in relatively short order, although it seems an age because of the Dardenne brothers’ slow pacing. Shots linger, which allows us to digest and savor and see time passing. The problem for me lay not in Cyril, but in Samantha, the natural beauty hairdresser who is instantaneously willing to bend her whole life to accommodate the troublesome (to put it mildly) boy, whom she doesn’t know and for whom she has no responsibility. Maybe she is just the artificial foil against whom we are to see Cyril’s story, but I could never get over the psychological void of her portrait.