These are fractious times for the fraternal duos of filmmaking. The Coen brothers, once inseparable, have parted artistic ways—Joel with a black-and-white Shakespeare adaptation, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” (2021), and Ethan with two colorful bursts of slapstick noir, “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024) and “Honey Don’t!” (2025). The Safdies are also flying solo: this past year brought us Benny’s “The Smashing Machine,” a lightweight but bruising portrait of a champion wrestler, and Josh’s “Marty Supreme,” a whiplash-inducing tale of a Ping-Pong powerhouse. Fittingly, more than a few observers have been eager to turn art into blood sport, pitting Coen against Coen, Safdie against Safdie, and theorizing about which sibling is the greater talent.

God forbid we should ever wage such a debate over the Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, who, on the evidence of their new drama, “Young Mothers,” are neither splitting up nor slowing down. Over roughly three decades, the Dardennes, now in their seventies, have built a filmography of such remarkable artistic, dramatic, and political consistency as to suggest a single cinematic consciousness in two bodies. In their breakthrough work, “La Promesse” (1997), they spun a taut realist thriller about a scrappy Belgian teen-ager, an exploiter of undocumented immigrants whose first stirrings of conscience began with the simplest thing: a promise he made, and refused to break, to a dying man. With that film, the Dardenne brothers effectively extended a vow of their own to the audience, one founded on closely held principles: sharp-edged realism, keen observation, and, crucially, extraordinary speed. A typical Dardenne movie runs about ninety minutes and spans, at most, a few days of narrative time. (The labor-rights drama “Two Days, One Night,” from 2014, is hardly their only film that could have borne that title.) A protagonist’s history matters, the filmmakers know, but life’s most significant confrontations—the ones that reveal who we are and what we’re made of—have a way of assailing us in an instant.

Decades later, the Dardennes’ impact on cinematic realism can scarcely be overstated, and they have, to some extent, been eclipsed by their own much revered influence. Their jagged techniques, absorbed by filmmakers the world over, have softened; they still follow their characters about in handheld long takes, but gone is their habit—deployed most radically in “The Son,” their masterpiece from 2003—of zeroing in on the back of a protagonist’s ear. Even so, they have never come close to breaking faith with those essential principles. At the heart of their work is the question of what we owe one another—what decency spurs us to do, and at what cost. In “The Son,” a carpenter weighs the possibility of avenging his child’s murder. In “The Kid with a Bike” (2012), a hairdresser is compelled, by forces beyond her understanding, to intervene on behalf of a young boy who has no one else. The realities of poverty, neglect, racism, and violence are harsh constants in the Dardennes’ working-class universe, but the filmmakers believe no less intently in the persistence of goodness—a force that is all the more powerful, they insist, for the stubborn unpredictability with which it can take root.