Among the big-name films contending for major hardware this awards season (A Star Is Born! Black Panther!), there's a much smaller movie making serious waves. We're talking about Roma, the Netflix-produced Spanish-language drama directed by Alfonso Cuarón.
The film, set in the early 1970s in Mexico City, revolves around the interconnected lives of two women: Cleo, a maid, and Sofia, her employer who lives in the house with her family. Both women have strained relationships with their significant others. Sofia's husband, Antonio, is often absent, and Cleo's boyfriend, Fermin, ditches her in a precarious situation early on. The two women gradually grow together - although their employer-employee relationship keeps them at a distance at first - and learn to support each other without the assistance of the mostly useless men in their lives.
For English-speaking audiences, director Cuarón is probably the only recognizable name in the cast. Yalitza Aparicio stars as Cleo,...
The film, set in the early 1970s in Mexico City, revolves around the interconnected lives of two women: Cleo, a maid, and Sofia, her employer who lives in the house with her family. Both women have strained relationships with their significant others. Sofia's husband, Antonio, is often absent, and Cleo's boyfriend, Fermin, ditches her in a precarious situation early on. The two women gradually grow together - although their employer-employee relationship keeps them at a distance at first - and learn to support each other without the assistance of the mostly useless men in their lives.
For English-speaking audiences, director Cuarón is probably the only recognizable name in the cast. Yalitza Aparicio stars as Cleo,...
- 12/22/2018
- by Amanda Prahl
- Popsugar.com
Stars: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa, Nancy García García, Verónica García, Andy Cortes, Fernando Grediaga, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza | Written and Directed by Alfonso Cuaron
It physically pains me to report that Alfonso Cuaron’s long anticipated follow up to his 2013 critically acclaimed masterpiece Gravity is, unfortunately, a flat and ever prolonged emotional dud. A one-hundred and thirty-minute passionate project that’s based on Cuaron’s own childhood, Roma follows a family and their maid that slowly but surely unfolds its flush hand in a sad manner of a placid, albeit weighted emotional substance that fleets in such an elongated and weak fashion.
Roma begins in a beautifully intoxicating fashion via outrageously beautiful visuals that are executed throughout in astounding monochrome from director ,and first time credited cinematographer, Alfonso Cuaron. Primarily enforcing slow pans that encapsulate the broader...
It physically pains me to report that Alfonso Cuaron’s long anticipated follow up to his 2013 critically acclaimed masterpiece Gravity is, unfortunately, a flat and ever prolonged emotional dud. A one-hundred and thirty-minute passionate project that’s based on Cuaron’s own childhood, Roma follows a family and their maid that slowly but surely unfolds its flush hand in a sad manner of a placid, albeit weighted emotional substance that fleets in such an elongated and weak fashion.
Roma begins in a beautifully intoxicating fashion via outrageously beautiful visuals that are executed throughout in astounding monochrome from director ,and first time credited cinematographer, Alfonso Cuaron. Primarily enforcing slow pans that encapsulate the broader...
- 12/19/2018
- by Jak-Luke Sharp
- Nerdly
Chicago – In one of the most arresting and beautiful films of the year, writer/director Alfonso Cuarón transports us back to 1970s Mexico City, to his childhood and his appreciation of memory. He also creates a human story around all the nostalgia, that all takes place in the neighborhood of “Roma.”
Rating: 5.0/5.0
The film is connectively expressive, from its hard look at domestic breakdown, its moments of relatable life emotions and its scenes of street fighting/anarchy. It was set in a time of difficult attitude and change, and the characters reflect that evolution. But the centerpiece is a domestic maid named Cleo, who slaves away for an upper middle class couple while at the same time embedding herself into that family. The understanding that Cuarón – who is known for his dramas, fantasy and Oscar recognized films (“Gravity”) – is interpreting his inner consciousness, and that conjures the same feeling as...
Rating: 5.0/5.0
The film is connectively expressive, from its hard look at domestic breakdown, its moments of relatable life emotions and its scenes of street fighting/anarchy. It was set in a time of difficult attitude and change, and the characters reflect that evolution. But the centerpiece is a domestic maid named Cleo, who slaves away for an upper middle class couple while at the same time embedding herself into that family. The understanding that Cuarón – who is known for his dramas, fantasy and Oscar recognized films (“Gravity”) – is interpreting his inner consciousness, and that conjures the same feeling as...
- 12/6/2018
- by adam@hollywoodchicago.com (Adam Fendelman)
- HollywoodChicago.com
Two stoical women divided by class are the heart and soul of the Oscar-winning director’s most personal film yet
“No matter what they tell you – women, we are always alone.” That’s a cry that echoes through writer/director Alfonso Cuarón’s gently sweeping, awards-tipped epic, his first Mexican-based movie since 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También. Inspired by memories of his childhood in Mexico City, and bristling with historical upheavals that mirror the domestic traumas (the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971 is shockingly restaged), it’s a bravura evocation of time and place, as richly detailed as the artfully designed worlds of Children of Men or A Little Princess. But at its heart are two women – both embattled yet resilient, and from very different backgrounds – who are left to clean up the mess after being abandoned or betrayed by the men in their lives.
Newcomer Yalitza Aparicio makes an astonishingly natural debut as Cleo,...
“No matter what they tell you – women, we are always alone.” That’s a cry that echoes through writer/director Alfonso Cuarón’s gently sweeping, awards-tipped epic, his first Mexican-based movie since 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También. Inspired by memories of his childhood in Mexico City, and bristling with historical upheavals that mirror the domestic traumas (the Corpus Christi massacre of 1971 is shockingly restaged), it’s a bravura evocation of time and place, as richly detailed as the artfully designed worlds of Children of Men or A Little Princess. But at its heart are two women – both embattled yet resilient, and from very different backgrounds – who are left to clean up the mess after being abandoned or betrayed by the men in their lives.
Newcomer Yalitza Aparicio makes an astonishingly natural debut as Cleo,...
- 12/2/2018
- by Mark Kermode, Observer filim critic
- The Guardian - Film News
You rarely see such an intimate tale painted on such a large canvas. In telling a story based on his own youth, filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón has made an epic movie about the women in his life. If that sounds a bit unusual, once you see the movie, it all makes sense. This is a flick that’s a tribute to these women, told in a specific yet universal way. Ever since the fall film festival circuit began, it has been getting almost exclusively raves. I’m here to continue that goos word of mouth. This is one of the best foreign works of the year, and just quality cinema in general. Netflix will be streaming this one next month, but it’ll be doing a limited run in theaters starting this Wednesday. It deserves to be seen on the big screen too. The film is a period piece drama, set in the early 1970’s.
- 11/20/2018
- by Joey Magidson
- Hollywoodnews.com
If a thing of beauty is a joy forever, as John Keats famously said, then the surpassing loveliness and bracing brilliance of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma will never pass into nothingness. Not as long as there are film lovers or a Netflix, the streaming service that stepped up to bring the movie (fully financed by Participant Media) to theaters for a limited run. (Its worldwide subscriber base, numbering over 137 million, will have the chance to see it starting Dec. 14th.) In other words, Cuarón’s semi-autobiographical memory piece about his 1970’s childhood in Mexico,...
- 11/19/2018
- by Peter Travers
- Rollingstone.com
On the surface, Roma is a harmonious masterpiece and soaring cine-sonnet to Mexican writer/director Alfonso Cuarón’s home and childhood. However, beneath its salient black and white facade, it operates using complex mechanisms, making Roma more profound and thought provoking than is evident when first watching. Set during one year (1971) in Roma (a local Mexican community), Cuarón’s film feels more like a lucid dream/ fluid recollection, than firsthand account of family life, or linear scenes from a stream of consciousness that sashay and deviate, but never simply tell.
Soapy water floods black and white tiles under the opening credits before low-gliding through the home of a local family. There we meet Antonio (Fernando Grediaga): a doctor/dad frequently away on business trips, leaving wife/ mother Sofia (Marina De Tavira) to raise their children with house maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), who gradually becomes Roma’s protagonist. Cuarón explores Cleo,...
Soapy water floods black and white tiles under the opening credits before low-gliding through the home of a local family. There we meet Antonio (Fernando Grediaga): a doctor/dad frequently away on business trips, leaving wife/ mother Sofia (Marina De Tavira) to raise their children with house maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), who gradually becomes Roma’s protagonist. Cuarón explores Cleo,...
- 10/16/2018
- by Daniel Goodwin
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Lff 2018 Roma Review Roma (2018) Film Review from the 62nd Annual London Film Festival, a movie directed by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Fernando Grediaga, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa, Carlos Peralta, Nancy Garcia, Diego Di Cort and Veronica Garcia. Roma is gorgeous to behold from the first frame to the last. Alfonso [...]
Continue reading: Film Review: Roma: Life as Film Through the Eyes of a Master [Lff 2018]...
Continue reading: Film Review: Roma: Life as Film Through the Eyes of a Master [Lff 2018]...
- 10/15/2018
- by Deyan Angelov
- Film-Book
From the very first shot of Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma — a close-up of a floor in a hallway, the sound of soapy water splashing in the background before washing over the tiles — you can sense that something special is about to happen. It’s not just the lack of opening fanfare in the soundtrack as the art deco credits roll (there will be no score; the only music you’ll hear will be the occasional song drifting out of a radio and the cacophonic symphony of street life). It’s not just the black-and-white cinematography,...
- 9/11/2018
- by David Fear
- Rollingstone.com
There was a surprising moment about halfway through Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma–during one of its multitude of breathtaking cinematic set pieces–when I began to wonder whether the first great wave of Vr films will better resemble the director’s previous film Gravity–a world where Hollywood megastars float precariously through oceans of special effects–or will they look more like his comparatively quaint new one, and perhaps be more emotionally engaging as a result. The filmmaker’s latest might be concerned with more humble lives than those of Bullock and Clooney’s shipwrecked astronauts but could it nevertheless be just as applicable to that burgeoning format?
Roma is comprised of a series of richly detailed vignettes, shot in deep-focus, in which the viewer can glance around, pluck out the most vibrant signs of life and thus string the narrative together. Despite the echoes of Fellini, the result feels...
Roma is comprised of a series of richly detailed vignettes, shot in deep-focus, in which the viewer can glance around, pluck out the most vibrant signs of life and thus string the narrative together. Despite the echoes of Fellini, the result feels...
- 8/31/2018
- by Rory O'Connor
- The Film Stage
“Roma” is the rare movie in no hurry to reveal what it’s about. Alfonso Cuarón’s first project in his native Mexico since “Y Tu Mamá También,” “Roma” has more in common with that movie’s character-based storytelling than any of the bigger productions he’s made since; it also exhibits a mastery unique to his command of the medium. The bittersweet tale of a housemaid in a middle-class neighborhood of Mexico City in the early ’70s, “Roma” channels Cuarón’s memories of his upbringing into a ravishing, meditative, black-and-white saga that mines its bittersweet story from the inside out.
At its center, Cleo (remarkable newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) works for a well-to-do family headed by Dr. Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) and his energetic wife Sofía (a scene-stealing Marina de Tavira) along with their four kids (Cuaron based the youngest of the unit on himself). A descendant of indigenous Mesoamerican tribes...
At its center, Cleo (remarkable newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) works for a well-to-do family headed by Dr. Antonio (Fernando Grediaga) and his energetic wife Sofía (a scene-stealing Marina de Tavira) along with their four kids (Cuaron based the youngest of the unit on himself). A descendant of indigenous Mesoamerican tribes...
- 8/30/2018
- by Eric Kohn
- Indiewire
Alfonso Cuarón is a filmmaker of such up-front humanity, and such commandingly sensual technique, that when you watch “Roma,” his shimmering black-and-white neorealist slice of life about a middle-class family and its loyal domestic worker in Mexico City in the early ’70s, you get the feeling that every image — every emotion — is perfectly set in place. Cuarón shot and co-edited “Roma” himself, in addition to writing and directing it, and the movie is so naturalistic that it’s like a dramatized documentary. At the same time, Cuarón turns his camera-eye gaze into something heady and aestheticized. He dunks us, moment by moment, image by luminously composed image, into a panorama of the hurly-burly of Mexico City in 1970 and 1971 — the glinting squalor of the streets, the Americanized fragments of pop culture (Creedence vs. the Beatles!), the tatters of class war. He puts us in close quarters with his characters, but he...
- 8/30/2018
- by Owen Gleiberman
- Variety Film + TV
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