The Kid With A Bike, 2011 (L’Enfant, 2005)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, cinema’s most acclaimed siblings that don’t answer to “Joel and Ethan,” have never written and directed a sequel. But there are plenty of parallels and shared themes to be detected in their body of work—and in at least one case, a dramatic conflict seems to have been carried over from one film to another. In the 2005 film L’Enfant, Jérémie Renier plays Bruno, a twentysomething petty thief who discovers an unconventional answer to his money problems: He sells his newborn child to a black market adoption agency. Bruno eventually stumbles upon a kind of redemption, and the final, Pickpocket-indebted scene implies that the double meaning of the title may not apply to him any longer. Still, when Renier pops up again in the Dardennes’ The Kid With A Bike, it’s possible to imagine that he’s playing an older version of the same character: Guy, as he goes by there, has also skirted parental responsibility, this time by allowing his 12-year-old son to fall into the foster care system. As deadbeat-dad moves go, that’s at least an improvement; better to neglect a child than to pawn him like stolen goods. [A.A. Dowd]