Roma (2018)

28 February 2020

Roma (2018) was the first film released on primarily streaming services (Netflix) to be nominated for best picture/director in the Academy Awards. It became the first foreign film to win best director (though it wasn't the first to win best picture - that's gone to Parasite (2019)). I finally got to catch it on Netflix and here are my general thoughts. The film is based on life experiences and memories of its director, Alfonso Cuarón, who also did films like Gravity and Children of Men. When I watched this I didn't know, so this initial review is without that knowledge.

Roma follows the life of a middle-class family and their maid Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) as they work through a series of family tragedies. Watching it, you get a very clear message that men are awful, awful people. Over top of this, a majority of this movie is rough and depressing, and you feel it through the 2h15m runtime. To me, the acting was very good and the writing was in places heartbreaking. The cinematography had a lot of panning, which to me was often distracting (I had similar issues with Cuarón's Gravity (2013) as well).

To me this was a solid story of this family's struggles, and it was very emotional (centered very much around Cleo), but the effort on the film felt almost forced into being over-produced: many scenes felt like they existed solely for the screenshots. I think over time I'll probably be more forgiving of this and like more in the future, but for now it felt like it was a well-done personal project that Netflix pushed too hard on. 7/10