This film about a Senegalese immigrant on trial in France is made all the more horrifying by its cool clarity

| Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 18, 2024

Instead of forcing viewers’ responses, Diop puts faith in her performers, which pays off in dividends.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 20, 2024

Alice Diop’s stunner of a film tucks a whole fraught universe into a courtroom drama.

| Dec 9, 2023

Saint Omer, a nominal courtroom drama, is a multifaceted and astounding gem of a film, posing moral and political quandaries that generate a wealth of intellectual and emotional consequences for viewer and character alike.

| Oct 2, 2023

Saint Omer is unforgettable and crucial. It does not forgive Coly, but it begs us to understand how such a terrible crime happened, and all the events that were not seen as criminal because they are baked into the fabric of society led to tragedy.

| Sep 6, 2023

Diop restrains herself and leaves the audience to bask in the juxtaposition between heritage, catharsis, memories, healing, and its quick touches of psychological surrealism.

| Original Score: B+ | Jul 29, 2023

Diop equips her talents as a documentarian to establish a naturalism to this courtroom drama.

| Jul 25, 2023

Diop will never forget Kabou, and audiences won't be able to get her film, its extraordinary story or its exceptional lead actors out of their heads, either.

| Jul 22, 2023

Deftly conveys the complexities of a Black female character whose narrative may appear to be that of a cut-and-dry Medea-like figure without the empathetic lens Diop provides.

| Jul 21, 2023

There is a dramatic reason for these wooden performances, but it still feels as if we are being kept at arm’s length.

| Jun 20, 2023

In penetrating beyond this position, Diop created a movie that looks to the very core of how we build and narrate stories, and what implications that has for the identities we give ourselves and others.

| Jun 13, 2023

Saint Omer takes a simple court procedural format and ever so slowly builds it into an overwhelming rumination on motherhood and racial expectations, not via the usual showy courtroom drama, but through silences and gazes as well as words.

| Jun 6, 2023

Saint Omer is a masterful exploration and explosion of courtroom drama conventions with so much more on its mind than innocence and guilt.

| Jun 6, 2023

It squeezes your throat and doesn't let go... [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 9/10 | Jun 5, 2023

It is Diop's layering, and deliberate blurring, of different mother and daughter relationships that underlines the film's central focus: maternal love, estrangement and resentment.

| May 26, 2023

At the end of it certain facts still don’t add up. They nag at you in what is otherwise a compelling film about motherhood in all its contradictions.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 25, 2023

In a finely crafted case of truth as perception, director Alice Diop leaves the obvious wide open.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 25, 2023

Saint Omer gradually and with subtlety peels back layers to reveal issues of culture and class, racism and misogyny, motherhood and daughterhood, and how Black women struggle to be seen in relationships, families, countries, courts.

| Mar 24, 2023

Even not as touching as it could be, this exquisitely acted film provides a guilty pleasure for those who like to dive into skepticism.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Mar 23, 2023

Diop resists the temptation to let Laurence off the hook altogether, to attribute her actions and motivations solely to mistreatment. To do so would be to deprive her of her humanity...

| Mar 9, 2023