family portraits; "L'Enfant" turns the lens on a father who's still a child himself, while in "Winter Passing" a daughter confronts her parents' past.(Lady Vengeance)(Movie review)

Nothing scares me off faster these days than hearing a movie praised for its "realism," a term that too often means scruffy actors looking miserable in dingy apartments. But I do make an exception for the superb work of Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne. When the Belgian brothers' latest film, L'Enfant (The Child), won top prize at Cannes last May-their second Palme d'Or in the last six years-it proved, yet again, their unrivaled knack for making the ordinary extraordinary. L'Enfant plunges us into the world of a feckless teen couple, Bruno (Jeremie Renie) and Sonia (Deborah Francois), who support their wayward existence with her welfare checks and his petty crimes. All that changes when they have a child. While motherhood releases Sonia's latent sense of responsibility, her hustling boyfriend has a bright moneymaking idea: He sells their baby. "It's no big deal," he tells Sonia. "We'll have another one." Such casual monstrosity exacts its price, and from the moment he pockets the dough, he finds himself assaulted by crooks, cops, and his own isolation. Even more than the baby, the movie's title refers to Bruno, whose need for moral awakening makes him the distant

offspring of one of Dosto-_ evsky's troubled loners.

Although its theme is spiritual redemption, L'Enfant holds you like a thriller, the tension slowly building until the action explodes into one of the most exciting chase scenes in years, a motor-scooter sequence all the more gripping because it's human scale-there aren't dozens of special-effects cars somersaulting down the freeway. The Dardennes respect the physical facts of the world-when Bruno jumps into a river, the water is heavy, and he stays wet a long time. But they equally honor the deep, often unspoken emotions that move us all, granting even the worst characters their humanity. From beginning to end, the movie is immaculately acted, especially by the oddly charismatic Renie, whose performance pulls off a rare trick: Even as he makes Bruno so enragingly irresponsible we'd like to throttle him, he lets us glimpse something inside this overgrown child that's worth saving.

Winter Passing plays like an indie knockoff of Proof. Zooey Deschanel stars as Reese Holden, the prickly, talented daughter of two famous writers, who's offered a small fortune for love letters her dead mother wrote her novelist father (Ed Harris). With her New York acting career going nowhere, she ...