Roma review round-up: Alfonso Cuarón's film is 'a grand, epic tale on the scale of Gone With the Wind'

Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s _Roma_ premiered at the Venice Film Festival on 30 August to overwhelmingly positive reviews, five years after his outer-space film Gravity enthralled critics and audiences alike, eventually going onto win seven Academy awards and six BAFTA Awards. [caption id=“attachment_5130231” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Roma. Image via Twitter[/caption] Set against the backdrop of 1970s Mexico City, the semi-autobiographical film chronicles the life of a middle class family and their live-in housekeeper. Displaying a rather rare occurance, _Roma_  holds an approval rating of 96% based on 23 reviews on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes while Metacritic indicated the film garnered “universal acclaim”, with a weighted average score of 96 out of 100. Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian calls Roma “his best film so far: a thrilling, engrossing and moving picture with a richly personal story to tell, beautifully and dynamically shot in pellucid black and white”. A similar sentiment is echoed by Todd Mccarthy of The Hollywood Reporter who relates Roma to a “memory film of unusual beauty that pushes to the foreground what is commonly left in the background.” Variety’s Owen Gleiberman lauds the film’s naturalistic style, comparing it to “dramatised documentary.” Eric Kohn of IndieWire declares Roma as Cuarón’s best film, after Y Tu Mama Tambien. He writes, _"_it feels as if the filmmaker is writing his memoirs with moving images, yielding a hypnotic effect closer in style to the muted aesthetic of Argentine auteur Lucrecia Martel, or Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman." Vulture’s Emily Yoshida observes that while episodic and observational, Roma is “also a grand, epic tale on the scale of Gone With the Wind — and as a result, more a portrait of a time and place than a specific character.” A major Oscar contender after Venice and Telluride,  along with First Man, The Favourite and A Star is Born, Roma is scheduled to releases in theaters, as well as Netflix, on 14 December 2018.