It looks like we’ve got a modern classic on our hands.
Writer/director Alfonso Cuarón is a bit of a genius, but he also takes his time with his movies.
It has been five years since Gravity swept up all of the Oscars and made a ridiculous amount of money at the box office.
It was seven years between that and Children Of Men, which still stands the test of time as one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made.
He’s also the guy behind the best (don’t @ me, it is simply a fact) Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner Of Azkaban.
So all eyes were on him to see what he’d do next, and he has decided to go very small scale with Roma.
Official synopsis via Participant Media:
The most personal project to date from Academy Award-winning director and writer Alfonso Cuarón, Roma follows Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a young domestic worker for a family in the middle-class neighborhood of Roma in Mexico City.
Delivering an artful love letter to the women who raised him, Cuarón draws on his own childhood to create a vivid and emotional portrait of domestic strife and social hierarchy amidst the political turmoil of the 1970s.
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival this week (alongside fellow potential Oscar-magnet First Man), the reviews that came out after the screening was nothing short of gushing:
“Cuarón never seeks a tidy resolution for their loving, lopsided, complicated relationship. But it’s one of the reasons why Roma leaves such a deep and lasting impression. 5 stars” – New York Magazine
“Roma is by far the most experimental storytelling in a career filled with audacious (and frequently excessive) gimmicks. Here, he tables the showiness of “Children of Men” and “Gravity” in favor of ongoing restraint, creating a fresh kind of intimacy. Like a grand showman working overtime to tone things down, he lures viewers into an apparently straightforward scene, only to catch them off guard with new information. 5 stars” – Indiewire
“This glorious, tender picture, a memoir written in film language, is only indirectly about the man who made it. He stands off to the side, in the shadows, beckoning us toward something. Roma is filmmaking as gesture, an invitation to generosity that we perhaps didn’t know we could feel. 5 stars” – Time Magazine
“Alfonso Cuarón has created a heartfelt masterpiece of mood and nostalgia, one that reminds us that his gifts as a storyteller and an interpreter of the human experience are not dictated by scale of production.” – The Wrap
“This is personal filmmaking taken to such an extremely minute level that at times it can almost feel prurient, like we’re accidentally eavesdropping on things too private for our ears, like we’ve intercepted an embrace sent back through time and not really meant for us at all.” – The Playlist
The movie will be premiering at certain cinemas around worldwide, but JOE have been in contact with some Irish cinemas and at present there are no plans to show Roma in any cinemas here, so it looks like we’ll have to wait for it to debut on Netflix on a currently-undisclosed date, but apparently it will be before the end of the year.
Check out the trailer right here:
Clip via Netflix
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