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

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

| Dec 9, 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

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

Alice Diop’s documentarian approach to the courtroom drama is fresh and urgent, consistently commanding attention to the women as they speak and listen.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 6, 2023

Diop deftly depicts the two women as distorted mirror images of each other: Rama recognises something in Laurence even as she abhors her crime.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 4, 2023

The film mounts its thesis while hardly needing to verbalise what’s going on: it mesmerises by reaching inside them to listen, even while others talk.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 4, 2023

Gavel-banging clichés are scoured away in Alice Diop’s subtly groundbreaking film.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 2, 2023

It is vital film-making.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 2, 2023

The standard for ‘Best of 2023’ lists has already been set.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Feb 1, 2023

In this narrative-fiction debut, the director Alice Diop understands that a restrained image can be more haunting than a graphic one.

| Jan 23, 2023

A powerful and perplexing film.

| Jan 18, 2023

It's not an easy film to watch. You really have to be in the mood for something uncompromising. I admit, it took me three times to really sit down and watch this with the focus it deserves.

| Jan 18, 2023

What makes the movie unforgettable are the scenes in the courtroom, every moment of them gripping.

| Jan 18, 2023

Diop’s direction of Saint Omer is spare in style but dense in emotional intelligence, heavy with its own inquiries. The visual set-ups seem simple, but they are constantly carving away at the harrowing question of what people are thinking.

| Jan 17, 2023

Diop’s film revels in the enigmatic power of uncertainty.

| Jan 16, 2023

The screenplay, alongside Kagmae’s restrained performance, takes its time to connect the dots, making Saint Omer’s payoff even grander.

| Original Score: A | Jan 14, 2023

Diop has turned a straightforward premise into the stuff of unassuming, unexpected and authentic poetry.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jan 14, 2023

A film of vast reach and great complexity.

| Jan 13, 2023

Throughout this dry, dull and bloodless movie, nothing like an honest grappling with the depravity of killing one’s own infant ever seems to occupy anyone’s attention.

| Jan 13, 2023