Roma

(MA15+) ★★★★½

Director: Alfonso Cuarón.

Cast: Yalitza Aparicio, Marina de Tavira, Marco Graf, Daniela Demesa, Diego Cortina Autrey, Carlos Peralta, Jorge Antonio Guerrero, Nancy García, Verónica García, Fernando Grediaga.

Group hug, sunburn be damned.

So what's all this fuss I hear about a Netflix movie getting nominated for a best film Oscar?

What matters is that it's a worthy nomination. The old systems are being torn down, new ones are being built, and while Roma (and The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs) got short cinema releases to appease Academy rules, these two films are evidence that streaming services are capable of pumping out Oscar-quality films.

Roma is Alfonso Cuarón's follow-up to Gravity, which saw him become the first Latin-American to win the best director Oscar and kickstarted a run that led to Mexican filmmakers winning that award four out of the last five years. He could easily continue that run here.

The film is a highly autobiographical and deeply personal look at Cuarón's youth. Set in 1970 in the Mexico City suburb of Roma, it follows a housekeeper named Cleo and the upper-middle class family she works for. Cleo tidies, serves their meals, and helps raise the children, and is as much a part of the family as the blood relatives who share the home.

But as Cleo goes about her job, her life goes through tremendous turmoil. Simultaneously, the family is going through major upheaval, and it's all against a backdrop of tumultuous times in the nation of Mexico.

Roma is an incredible blend of the everyday and the surreal, the personal and the political, the small scale and the big picture. It's a marvellous snapshot of life in a very specific time and place, but it touches on the universal themes of family. And it's as much about the bizarre and dramatic incidents that punctuate an otherwise dreary existence as it is also about the dreary existence itself, and how people keep on keeping on in the face of adversity.

It's utterly absurd in places, even laugh out loud funny on occasion, yet hits you with great emotional weight soon after. A seemingly random bushfire is the setting for a spontaneous song, an en masse martial arts group is intertwined with an important personal moment for Cleo, and there's even a bit where a man gets shot out of a cannon that is merely background noise to an otherwise mundane scene.

This is what makes Roma great - the big details going on behind the small personal ones. The Corpus Christi Massacre, in which about 120 protesting students were gunned down by a paramilitary unit is an important event, but it's not the focus of scene or what is happening in the lives of the main characters. Obviously some of the minor details in the film mean a lot more to Cuarón than the casual filmgoer, but it helps to paint a rich picture that pays off increasingly as the film progresses.

This makes for some incredible sequences, often involving a huge number of extras, and Cuarón's ability to maintain our focus on the big and the small simultaneously is exemplary. Long takes, slow pans, great depths of field, and beautifully filmed scenes mostly using natural light add to the reality of the situations. Its crisp black and white cinematography is beautiful.

Yalitza Aparicio's turn as Cleo is great, and made all the more exceptional for the fact she has never acted before in her life. She earns her best actress Oscar nod in two gut-wrenching moments, but her performance is incredibly low-key, despite her carrying the film (she's in every scene). The real MVP is Marina de Tavira as the family's mother, Sofia. Hers is the more nuanced performance, and well worthy of the best supporting actress Oscar nomination.

Could a Netflix movie win the best film Oscar come February 24? You better believe it.