The courtroom drama reimagined in ‘Saint Omer’

Hello! I’m Mark Olsen. Welcome to another edition of your regular field guide to a world of Only Good Movies.

I just want to express my personal feelings of shock and sadness at the death of Lisa Marie Presley at age 54 on Thursday. This came only two days after she was out supporting the movie “Elvis” at the Golden Globes. She is gone too soon, taken from a family that has seen their lives too often scarred by tragedy.

Enter the VardaVerse at the Academy. The Academy Museum opens a new series this weekend with “Enter the VardaVerse: Los Angeles Countercultures 1968-1981,” which runs through the end of February. The series is based around three films made by Agnès Varda in Los Angeles — “Lions Love (… and Lies),” “Mur murs” and “Documenteur” — and places them in conversation with films such as “Model Shop” (directed by Varda’s husband, Jacques Demy), Penelope Spheeris’ “The Decline of Western Civilization,” Bill Norton’s “Cisco Pike,” Ulysses Jenkins’ “Remnants of the Watts Festival” and more. (A special alert for a 35-millimeter screening of the Joan Didion adaptation “Play It as It Lays.”) The series looks to be a celebration of Varda’s inventiveness and imagination, but also the endless inspiration to be found in Los Angeles.

“Submarine” at the Cinematheque. Curated by Jesse Eisenberg, who will give a pre-recorded introduction, the American Cinematheque presents “Submarine” in 35-millimeter, Jan. 14 at the Los Feliz 3. The 2010 feature debut as writer and director from Richard Ayoade, the film is a delightfully melancholy coming-of-age comedy starring Craig Roberts, Yasmin Paige and Sally Hawkins. Unfortunately, Ayoade has only directed one film since, 2013’s “The Double,” starring Eisenberg in a dual role.

‘Show Me Love’ at Mezzanine. Swedish filmmaker Lukas Moodysson was all of 28 when he made his debut in 1998 with “Show Me Love,” a lively and emotionally resonant story that earned the praise of no less than Ingmar Bergman. Set in a small town, the film tells the story of two young girls who embark on a seemingly unlikely romance. Mezzanine will screen the movie Jan. 15 at 2220 Arts + Archives, and this is an all-too-rare chance to see the film in a theater, in a new 2K restoration. The event is sold out, but there is a waitlist.

‘Saint Omer’

The fiction feature debut from acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alice Diop, “Saint Omer” is France’s entry for the international feature Oscar. In the film, based on a real case, Rama (Kayije Kagame), a novelist, observes the trial of Laurence Coly (Guslagie Malanda), a Senegalese immigrant accused of killing her infant daughter. The film is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “This supremely intelligent and haunting movie, a major prizewinner at last year’s Venice International Film Festival and a shortlisted Oscar contender for best international feature, is very much an attempt to reckon with [Laurence] and with actions often branded with the cliché of ‘unthinkable.’ With remarkable stealth and concentration, Diop rewires the generic circuitry of the courtroom drama, avoiding its natural inclination toward sensationalism and grandstanding. She also preserves, through a seamless meld of fiction and nonfiction, the contours and complexities of a terrible true story.”

Also for The Times, Emily Zemler spoke to Diop and Malanda. Diop, who attended the actual trial on which the story is based, spoke of how she came to shoot the courtroom scenes. “I was not interested in fabricating a fiction but in capturing a truth in the emotion and an intensity,” the director said. “Those very long one-shots allowed me to capture that, as we were not re-creating but living the actual moments. I wanted to create the feeling that the actors were actually living the experience. They were not performing.”

For the New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “These are hard questions, and Diop faces them with ardent, open-minded curiosity, resisting any obvious pronouncements about identity, individuality or universal values. Her main characters aren’t the embodiment of social problems or political failures, but both women undergo an emotional ordeal that is also a crisis of meaning, an existential conundrum that defies description, or even naming. … ‘Saint Omer’ is a film saturated in discourse, its silences are where its deepest insight resides. The pain that connects Rama and Laurence is like a secret language, an untranslatable grammar of alienation and loss. We read it in their faces.”

For the Playlist, Robert Daniels wrote, “Diop’s ‘Saint Omer’ doesn’t condescend to the viewer by slinking toward black-and-white offerings of good and evil, or broad statements about race or gender. This ripped-from-the-headlines narrative accomplishes a feat far more creative, and a bit less forced. It dances on the surface of these participants, and in their subtle ripples, to reveal the humanity in the seemingly inhumane.”

For the Hollywood Reporter, Lovia Gyarkye wrote, “‘Saint Omer’ might be fiction, but Diop does not stray too far from her documentary roots. The film maintains a sense of naturalism even during its most tense moments. Diop’s directing style leans observational, as if she is watching and recording her screenplay’s effect on her performers. … ‘Saint Omer’s’ power comes from its subtlety — the way characters sneak glances at each other in the courtroom, the intensity of their stares, the way their tone changes depending on the audience, how they construct their stories. These details destabilize what, at first, seems like a fixed narrative, prompting us to ask questions beyond innocence and guilt, truth and lies.”

Kayije Kagame in the movie “Saint Omer.”

(Neon)

‘No Bears’

Directed by Jafar Panahi, the embattled Iranian filmmaker who has been imprisoned since finishing the project, “No Bears” continues his run of astonishingly creative, self-examining work made under extremely difficult conditions. In this latest film, Panahi relocates to a small rural border town to remotely oversee a film being made in Turkey, while he runs afoul of locals over a photograph he may or may not have taken. The film is in theaters now.

For The Times, Justin Chang wrote, “With Panahi now serving a six-year prison sentence, ‘No Bears’ is likely to be his last cinematic dispatch for some time. But part of the point he’s making in this movie is that his constraints have never been purely physical, and neither are his means of resistance. Cinema, like the world itself, is full of invisible boundaries, governed by rules and assumptions that Panahi has long challenged with extraordinary resourcefulness and good-natured cunning. … The realities of the situation are grim enough that a lesser work might have paled into insignificance, but ‘No Bears’ — the best and bravest new feature I saw last year, a work of extraordinary emotional power, conceptual ingenuity and critical force — somehow manages the opposite. Panahi has made, paradoxically, a great movie about a medium that often falls short of greatness. You long to see him free, not least so he can make another.”

For Time, Stephanie Zacharek wrote, “In ‘No Bears,’ Panahi is both playing himself and being himself, allowing himself to express even more bewilderment and anger than he’s revealed in films like ‘Closed Curtain’ (2013) or ‘Taxi’ (2015), made in his earlier years in exile. The metaphorical weight of ‘No Bears’ is heavy. In the movie, he’s being held hostage by peasants who mindlessly favor tradition and superstition over humanity, a version of what his government is doing in real life, but in an even more treacherous way. … In ‘No Bears,’ the 62-year-old Panahi shows nothing more than the normal effects of aging: his hair is grayer than before, the lines in his face perhaps slightly more pronounced. But this is hardly a broken man. He knows one thing for sure: defiance is the ultimate act of survival.”

For Film Comment, Jamsheed Akrami wrote, “‘No Bears’s’ most potent moment of political commentary, and the origin of the film’s title, arrives when a resident of Jaban insists on accompanying Panahi through a dark alleyway because of the bears that supposedly roam the area—and then later, with no explanation, says that there are no bears; those are just fanciful stories arising from people’s paranoia. This metaphor could not be more timely, as the current uprising led by Iranian women—galvanized by the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, who was detained by the Guidance Patrol (the religious morality police) for wearing her hijab ‘improperly’—clearly demonstrates that the people have opened their eyes to the fact that the repressive Islamic Republic is a paper bear not worthy of their fear. As they take to the streets to regain their stolen freedom, a filmmaker confined in a prison cell must be hoping for a brighter future for his nation, and for himself.”

For Variety, Jessica Kiang wrote, “Panahi again manages to deliver moments of rich visual interest within a necessarily off-the-cuff aesthetic. And his own onscreen presence is as wryly avuncular as ever, lending increased weight to the frustration and self-directed anger that flashes from him as the separate but echoing strands of the film both move inexorably toward tragedy. There are no bears in ‘No Bears,’ where the ursine threat, a little like a national border or an archaic, repressive tradition, is a fiction designed to keep inhabitants from straying too far from the village alone. But it doesn’t matter if such dangers and demarcations physically exist. If the fear and hostility they engender is real, they can be just as lethal.”

Jafar Panahi in the movie “No Bears.”

(Sideshow / Janus Films)

‘Skinamarink’

Already something of a viral sensation online, “Skinamarink” is the debut feature from Canadian writer-director Kyle Edward Ball. Made for a reported $15,000, the film uses a spare, lo-fi visual style to tell the story of two young children who find themselves alone and trapped in a house. The film is in theaters now and will be streaming on Shudder later in the year.

For The Times, Noel Murray wrote, “There is always a danger too that when a horror picture gets this much hype, people will arrive unprepared for how unusual the experience will be. So be warned: ‘Skinamarink’ is atypical in nearly every way. It’s not flawless. A lot of what Ball is doing here might’ve been more effective within a shorter running time; and more narrative clarity likely wouldn’t have killed the overall vibe. But the chances Ball takes pay off in a one-of-a-kind film that re-creates the sensation of being very young and essentially powerless, unable even to articulate why everything feels so … wrong.”

For IndieWire, David Ehrlich wrote, “A micro-budget phenomenon that leveraged a fortuitous leak into the kind of buzz that an indie film can’t buy, Kyle Edward Ball’s deeply unnerving ‘Skinamarink’ might be too indebted to YouTube horror trends to feel like a sui generis genre-changer, but this is still the sort of movie so committed to its own strange language that it’s best translated through references to more familiar work. If the final product amounts to a f—ed-up tone poem rather than a full-cooked meal — an inscrutable, 100-minute nightmare that proves its own concept at the expense of developing it further — that uncompromised sense of experimentation also helps to demonstrate how vital horror movies can be at a time when the rest of the film world is too scared to try anything new.”

For Rolling Stone, K. Austin Collins wrote, “Stare at anything for too long and it starts to move. That’s what watching ‘Skinamarink’ is like: You’re watching the familiar suddenly jolt alive with new, uncanny energy. ‘Skinamarink’ is not a fleshed-out, robust narrative adventure. It is a slim experiment. … One of the best things about it is its controlled discretion, its willingness to resist our eagerness for sensational thrills or for the familiar rhythm of an amped-up climax. Instead, we’re given an ending that tears the threadbare fabric of the movie apart even more — quiet horror at its finest. ‘Skinamarink’ isn’t scary because of what it depicts. It’s scary because it already knows that our imagination will do half of the work.”

A still from “Skinamarink.”

(Shudder)