Roma

Alfonso Cuarón's black-and-white memory piece is one of the most unanimously acclaimed films of its decade — widely hailed as his masterpiece and as a landmark of personal filmmaking. Shot by the director himself with a sound design reviewers repeatedly called among the best ever assembled, it renders early-1970s Mexico City with documentary-grade precision that somehow still feels like a dream. At its center is first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio as Cleo, a Mixtec housekeeper whose quiet, watchful face critics described as the film's soul; her performance, and Marina de Tavira's as the family matriarch, are what keep Cuarón's formal perfectionism from ever feeling cold.

The film is deliberately episodic and observational — it drifts through a year in a middle-class household's life rather than driving toward a conventional plot, and that restraint is the source of both its power and its principal criticism. Some reviewers found it remote, even aloof, a series of perfectly composed tableaux that holds its characters at a reverent distance; others warned that its languid rhythms, especially when watched at home on a streaming service, can read as slow or uneventful. A sharper line of criticism questioned whose story it really is: a domestic worker's life told from the memory of the family she served, with Cleo's interiority and politics left underexplored and the political backdrop — most notably the 1971 massacre of student demonstrators — sometimes feeling like clumsy scenery rather than lived context.

Most critics agreed, however, that its themes — class and racial hierarchy, abandonment, maternal devotion, and the way private grief and national trauma run on parallel tracks — are delivered with uncommon empathy, and that its climactic beach sequence ranks among the most overwhelming stretches of filmmaking in recent memory. The genuine critical split was less about quality than about approach: whether Cuarón's floating, memory-like distance is respectful witnessing or emotional withholding. Even the film's detractors conceded the craft; its admirers called it an empathy machine and the best film of the year.