Palme d’Or winners for 1999’s Rosetta (review) and L’Enfant (2005), Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne have attempted to three-peat this past decade with 2011’s The Kid with a Bike (winner of the Grand Prix prize), 2014’s Two Days, One Night and 2016’s The Unknown Girl (review). Their eleventh feature film and eighth consecutive competition film, Le Jeune Ahmed adheres to their beginnings in cinema mixing non professional actors with socially conscious template and bleak realism. Set in Belgium, this is about a young fanatic barely out of childhood who plans to kill his teacher in the name of his religion. How can love of life win out over his desire to put someone to death?

A “lesser” Dardennes effort to say the least, it will likely not be a third Palme with this number. 16 of our 20 critics weighed in for an average of 2.3 on 5, well below their previous scores. Next up: Frankie.
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