Roma (2018)

“Cuarón uses one household on one street to open up a world, working on a panoramic scale often reserved for war stories, but with the sensibility of a personal diarist. It’s an expansive, emotional portrait of life buffeted by violent forces, and a masterpiece.” — Manohla Dargis, The New York Times

SYNOPSIS

Drawing deeply from his own childhood memories, Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma renders the intimate rhythms of domestic life on the scale of an epic. Yalitza Aparicio gives a remarkable debut performance as Cleo, an Indigenous domestic worker caring for a middle-class family in early-1970s Mexico City as upheavals within the household begin to converge with the political violence unfolding beyond its walls. Serving as his own cinematographer, Cuarón captures Cleo’s world in luminous large-format black-and-white images, favoring intricate long takes and panoramic compositions that find monumental beauty and drama in seemingly ordinary experience. At once personal memoir, social portrait, and reckoning with the inequalities of class and race, Roma finds the sweep of history reflected in the life of one woman too often relegated to its margins.