Roma (2018) review

A maid, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), dotes on a troubled family in Mexico City in the early 1970's: their father recently abandoned them (for another woman) and she becomes pregnant ... but the baby's father runs off with a paramilitary group. Cuarón, the Mexican Soderbergh, tries selling this as a quasi-autobiography, but it's very cold and distant - none of the warm fuzzies - as he, doubling as cinematographer, focuses largely on pretty compositions instead of, I don't know, discussing what is going on politically in his homeland at that time or even bothering to develop his characters at all. It doesn't help that the movie revolves around an expressionless cleaning woman who has little to say and needs a scene involving a stillborn baby (!!) for any kind of human connection: prior to that it's like staring at people through a black and white fishbowl (he also references Fellini's 8 1/2 and his own movie Gravity, just to pat himself on the back). The accolades it's gotten are unwarranted, but it does show Cuarón makes the kind of vapid middlebrow films some individuals think 'amount to something.'