Summer is only just now upon us, which means it’s way too early to take stock of the year’s best movies. Or is it? We all know that the Oscar pundits don’t really start making noise until the final months of the year, from September to December those are the months in which the Oscar hopefuls start rolling in, and studios start campaigning for their big releases. But the halcyon days of June, July, and August shouldn’t be undervalued this is the perfect time to catch up on terrific movies that may have eluded your radar in the early months of 2023. The avalanche of hype will start soon enough. Catch up on these smaller but no less worthy pictures now, before the conversation turns into a noisy free-for-all. Saint Omer French documentary filmmaker Alice Diop’s first fiction feature is based on a real-life French court case involving a Senegalese immigrant who left her 15-month-old daughter on a beach to die. From that story, Diop has extracted a picture that’s both poetic and compassionately direct. Rama Kayije Kagame, a professor and novelist, travels from Paris to the town of Saint-Omer to attend the trial of a woman named Laurence Coly Guslagie Malanda, accused of an unthinkable crime that she doesn’t deny. Rama’s plan is to gather material for an updated retelling of Medea. But as she listens to Laurence’s story, she begins to see the web of experience and feeling that connects her with her subject. This is a perceptive and delicately unnerving work, a reflection on the way humans can instinctively reach out to one another even across seemingly uncrossable chasms. Malanda’s radiantly somber face, held by the camera with a kind of inquisitive tenderness as she tells her story on the stand, is the heart of the picture.