Critics reviews

[Cleo’s] baby dies in the background, in a scene that disturbed me more for its virtuosity, which seemed out of touch with what was happening in it.

Cuarón has spoken of the guilt that likely steered the film’s focus towards Cleo and away from a more explicitly self-centred exercise in recreation. What might feel a little grating, I think, is the attempt to assuage post-hoc guilt through an auteurist reach that, by nature of its content, indulges self-reflexivity.

This may seem like an old argument about the relevance of auteur theory or the inevitability of artistic imitation. It is neither. Imitation or appropriation, like any other artistic approach, can and has been a valuable method of creative practice. Roma, on the other hand, does not acknowledge its debt to this practice, nor its debt to the dialectics of time.

From the first scenes, the sensory details of the world [Cuarón] paints, the leisurely pace with which he paints it, and his nonjudgmental comprehensiveness attach themselves to a viewer’s heartstrings.

Yes, there are limitations to its gaze, as with any story told by a second-person narrator, but with its crisp black-and-white photography, impressively choreographed long takes, and painstakingly detailed production design, accompanied by an astonishing use of diegetic sound and music, Roma is a masterful spectacle.

It’s so rare for the very properties of cinema to become the centerpiece of a popular film: whether watching it on screens mammoth or miniscule, viewers of ROMA are invited to feel the weight of experience through sound and image design.

Roma's most preeminent achievement seems to be winning back an invigorating dose of authenticity of the real for the cinema, particularly via the long take.

Both [Roma and At Eternity’s Gate] wrest the sensuality of cinematic scale and soundscape back from its usual association with the Hollywood blockbuster.

Roma’s 1970s cosmos may have been judiciously recreated from scratch by Cuarón (whom production company Netflix awarded a whopping 108 days to shoot), but the feeling here is to enter a world that’s been left untouched in years, a spirited place abandoned since childhood and revisited for one last, heart-quickening farewell.

Cleo hardly speaks more than a sentence or two at a time and says nothing at all about life in her village, her childhood, her family. She’s a loving and caring young woman, and the warmth of her feelings for the family she works for—and theirs for her—is apparent throughout. But Cleo remains a cipher; her interests and experiences—her inner life—remain inaccessible to Cuarón.

In this transaction—according to a New York Times profile on the director, Rodríguez refused monetary compensation—Cuarón leverages his familial access and plunders the memories of his former nanny to use them as raw material. But before finding value in her story, he must infect her gaze and hollow out her point of view.

I can’t recall another art movie so openly patronizing toward its subject, yet so self-flattering of its maker’s largesse.