Two Days, One Night

Academy Award nominee Marion Cotillard gives the best performance of her career in Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne's powerful and emotionally devastating Two Days, One Night. The setup is 12 Angry Men meets the world economic crisis—Cotillard plays a working mother whose colleagues vote to have her fired rather than lose their bonuses. Egged on by her husband, she is given the weekend to convince her co-workers to give up the money and take her back, an ego-demolishing task that doesn't exactly mix well with her copious antidepressant use. As she drags herself from co-worker to co-worker, her misery becomes their misery, and a profound image of working-class dehumanization is drawn. The Dardennes have been producing insightful and bleak slices of lower-class life for over a quarter century, but with its shattering star turn and tighter narrative structure, Two Days, One Night is their most accessible movie yet. D.B.