Never Look Away.

Never Look Away (iTunesamazon) was the last film for me to see from this year’s Oscar batch; I like to try to see all of the films nominated in major categories, including acting and directing, which is often a challenge for the five films nominated in Best Foreign Language Film. Never Look Away, Germany’s submission for last year, took one of those nominations but also earned a nod for Best Cinematography, and writer/director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck had won the foreign film award previously for the acclaimed 2006 film The Lives of Others, which I need to see (and is streaming on Netflix at the moment). The particular catch with Never Look Away is that the movie is 189 minutes long, which is well beyond what I think I can handle in a single sitting in the theater, so I missed its run in the art theaters of Philly. It’s really tremendous, in hindsight one of my top ten movies of 2018, and certainly deserved its spot in the Best Foreign Language Film category. I wonder if, had it been shorter and a bit easier to see, it would have had a little buzz for Best Picture, because it’s such a beautiful, high-minded film, anchored by two very strong performances.

Never Look Away is based loosely on the life of Gerhard Richter, a German painter best known for a particular style of painting photographs on canvas, hewing closely to real events of his childhood and his professional life. The protagonist here, renamed Kurt Barnert, is born just as the Nazis are gaining power in Germany, and is traumatized by seeing his favorite aunt, who encouraged his interest in art, suffer a mental health breakdown, after which the Nazis forcibly commit her and then put her to death in a concentration camp. In art school, he meets a young woman named Ellie – who reminds him of his deceased aunt – and falls in love with her, not realizing that her father, a gynecologist, had an important role in the Nazi regime. Kurt and Ellie survive the war, but in postwar East Germany he only gets to paint scenes of Socialist Realism, so the two defect shortly before the Berlin Wall goes up, allowing him to secure a place in an important art school in West Berlin, where he eventually has his creative breakthrough. The love story between the two characters, which is the movie’s major fictional aspect, is woven into the lead character’s artistic narrative, as the saintly Ellie serves both as the great love of Kurt’s life and also a major inspiration for his eventual success as an artist.

Never Look Away moves along shockingly well for a movie of this length and scope, in part because von Donnersmarck doesn’t linger too long over most scenes, especially after the fairly extended prologue of scenes just before and during World War II, which serve primarily to set up Kurt’s character and the ensuing drama with Ellie’s father. Schilling is very compelling as Kurt, appropriately brooding and intense, never truly at ease even with Ellie, while Sebastian Koch (who reminds me of the late Austrian singer Falco) is perfectly insidious as Ellie’s father, whose professional demeanor hides his machinations and drive for self-preservation.

Paula Beer plays Ellie as well as she can, but the character’s primary function is to stand still and look pretty, which is arguably the movie’s biggest flaw – there are no female characters here of any depth. There are various women who play critical roles in Kurt’s life, from his aunt Elizabeth to Ellie to Ellie’s mother (Ina Weisse, looking a lot like Cate Blanchett from Carol), but they’re all at the story’s periphery, and Ellie – who I think is a pastiche of Richter’s wives, but is clearly not a real, single character – gets virtually no exposition, no explanation of why she’s in love with Kurt, no description of her life outside of his view, and no function in the plot beyond the connection to her father and her trouble getting pregnant.

Once a film gets past 130-140 minutes, the question of need becomes salient – did the movie have to be this long? Did Never Look Away need to run a shade over three hours, and does it make sufficient use of that time? The answer is rarely yes, but in this case, von Donnersmarck doesn’t waste a minute; the pace is consistent, never dragging, but of course never rushing, and he uses some of the space he’s allotted to himself to express the struggle of an artist looking for his voice without boring the viewer. (The film has very little humor, but the scenes of Kurt trying out new ideas, and getting reactions from his colleague Günther, are the closest this movie comes to comedy.) The cinematography that garnered such praise is a function of different camera angles and shifting shots to compare the scope of art to the world around it, rather than the lingering landscape scenes I tend to associate with Best Cinematography nominees.

Roma was obviously going to win the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, but in the competition for second place behind it, Never Look Away was clearly worthy of one of the four other nominations, and I think if the film were shorter it might have at least gained support in another category – perhaps Best Director, where Pawe? Pawlikowski got a nod for the Polish-language Cold War. I’d put Never Look Away over Cold War for a more credible story and its stronger exploration of the meaning of art, both to the public and to the artist himself, although I can’t put it above Burning, my #1 movie of last year, or Roma. Even with the lack of definition around the women in the film, it’s still riveting, and for me to say that about a movie of this length is more evidence of just how compelling it was.

Oscar picks for 2019.

With the Oscars coming up tonight, I’ve put together this post with some loose predictions, my own picks for each award, and, most importantly, links to every one of these films I’ve reviewed. I’ve seen everything nominated in all of these categories except one documentary, one foreign film, and one animated short. 

Chris Crawford and I also recorded a podcast (for the second year in a row) to preview the Oscars, which you can download via iTunes or SoundCloud.

 

Best Picture

BlacKkKlansman
Black Panther
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Favourite
Green Book
Roma
A Star is Born
Vice

Who will win: Roma
Who I’d vote for: Roma

Snubs: I don’t understand why the Academy would only fill eight of its ten allotted spots for nominations in this category, especially in a year with easily twice that many films worthy of the honor. The two most obvious candidates the Academy overlooked here were First Man and If Beale Street Could Talk, but I’d also have pushed for Burning, Cold War, even Widows before pablum like Green Book or Bohemian Rhapsody.

Best Director

BlacKkKlansman
Cold War
The Favourite
Roma
Vice

Who will win: Roma (Alfonso Cuarón)
Who I’d vote for: Roma

Snubs: I’m surprised Bradley Cooper wasn’t nominated for A Star is Born.

I’d be very surprised if Cuarón lost this one, even if Roma doesn’t win Best Picture.

Best Actor

Christian Bale, Vice
Bradley Cooper, A Star is Born
Willem Dafoe, At Eternity’s Gate
Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody
Virgo Mortensen, Green Book

Who will win: Bale
Who I’d vote for: Cooper

The Academy really botched this category, giving four of five nods to actors who portrayed real people, three of them giving us extended impersonations that were more remarkable for their accuracy than for any depth of performance. The fifth is playing a role that has been played three times before. Is that what the Oscar is supposed to reward? Is this acting, or just impersonating?

It seems like Malek has the popular momentum, and maybe he and his prosthetic teeth will win the award, but I’ll be a bit contrarian here and predict Bale takes the honor because the role is also more ‘important’ – Vice is an unabashedly political film, an outright attack on the legacy of the George W. Bush years, that has to resonate with the generally left-wing voters of the Academy.

Snubs: Woof. Ethan Hawke for First Reformed and Joaquin Phoenix for You Were Never Really Here come to mind immediately. Ryan Gosling was great in First Man; Stephan James was solid in If Beale Street Could Talk.

Best Actress

Yulitza Aparicio, Roma
Glenn Close, The Wife
Olivia Colman, The Favourite
Lady Gaga, A Star is Born
Melissa McCarthy, Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Who will win: Close
Who I’d vote for: Colman

The Wife was the worst movie I saw in 2018 – it is awful, sentimental, hackneyed, one-dimensional dreck – yet Close seems likely to win for a fine performance of a poorly-written character.

Snubs: No shortage of whiffs here either – Rosamund Pike for A Private War, Joanna Kulig for Cold War, Elsie Fisher for Eighth Grade, Viola Davis for Widows, Natalie Portman for Annihilation, Juliette Binoche for Let the Sunshine In, Claire Foy for First Man (perhaps as a Supporting Actress).

Best Actor in a Supporting Role

Mahershala Ali, Green Book
Adam Driver, BlacKkKlansman
Sam Elliott, A Star is Born
Richard E. Grant, Can You Ever Forgive Me?
Sam Rockwell, Vice

Who will win: Ali
Who I’d vote for: Ali*

I put an asterisk there because I’m torn between Ali and Driver – BlacKkKlansman does not work without Driver’s performance. Grant is wonderful as well.

Snubs: Rockwell belongs here least of all – he’s just doing a good impression of W. as an amiable post-frat boy. His slot should have gone to Steven Yeun for Burning, and you could make a case for Michael B. Jordan for Black Panther.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Amy Adams, Vice
Marina de Tavira, Roma
Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Emma Stone, The Favourite
Rachel Weisz, The Favourite

Who will win: King
Who I’d vote for: Weisz

King has been penciled in as a lock since before this movie even hit theaters, even though she’s not in the film very much and her role isn’t all that well-written. Weisz and Stone both had far more to do – there’s a real debate over whether those are supporting roles at all – and do more with what they’re given.

Snubs: Elizabeth Debecki for Widows. Her performance was the film’s biggest revelation and she had by far the best story arc of the script; Adams’ spot should have gone to her.

Best Adapted Screenplay

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
BlacKkKlansman
Can You Ever Forgive Me?
If Beale Street Could Talk
A Star Is Born

What will win: BlacKkKlansman
What I’d vote for: If Beale Street Could Talk

This feels like the spot where Spike Lee gets an Oscar, even though the screenplay for BlacKkKlansman was all over the place. Of course, I think Burning deserved a nomination here, certainly over the Coens’ screenplay for what was basically an anthology.

 

Best Original Screenplay

The Favourite
First Reformed
Green Book
Roma
Vice

What will win: The Favourite
What should win: The Favourite

As much as I loved Roma, the screenplay itself is the least important part of the film – it’s the look, feel, and sound of the thing, as well as the lead performance by Aparicio.

Best Foreign Language Film

Capernaum
Cold War
Never Look Away
Roma
Shoplifters

What will win: Roma
What I’d vote for: Roma

I haven’t seen Never Look Away, from the director/writer of The Lives of Others, because it’s 188 minutes long. This feels like a dead lock for Roma, but my #1 movie of 2018 was South Korea’s submission, Burning, which made the shortlist (of nine films) yet missed the cut for the final five. It absolutely should have taken Capernaum‘s slot.

Best Animated Feature

Incredibles 2
Isle of Dogs
Mirai
Ralph Breaks the Internet
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse

What will win: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-verse
What I’d vote for: Isle of Dogs

This also feels like a lock, although I think Spider-Man is notable only for its animation style, with a very undistinguished story that relies on superhero tropes and far too much violence for its audience. Isle of Dogs may have come out too early in the year, and it may have suffered from criticisms of its portrayal of Japanese culture, but it’s a better movie across the board – and so is Mirai.

Snubs: Tito and the Birds, a Brazilian film with gorgeous animation and a good story, would have been a far better choice than Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is a mostly forgettable sequel.

Best Documentary Feature

Free Solo
Hale County, This Morning, This Evening
Minding the Gap
Of Fathers and Sons
RBG

What will win: Minding the Gap
What I’d vote for: Of Fathers and Sons

I haven’t seen Free Solo yet – I will in about two weeks – but I truly have no good sense of what’s going to win this one, especially since the most popular documentary of 2018, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, was one of the biggest surprise omissions of all of the nominations this year. It’s remarkable that Of Fathers and Sons was even made, and its story is as important as any of the five nominated films.

Best Animated Short Film

Animal Behaviour
Bao
Late Afternoon
One Small Step
Weekends

What will win: Bao
What I’d vote for: Weekends

I haven’t seen Animal Behaviour, but any of the other four could win and I’d be happy with it. All are well-made, appealing to look at, and boast strong, short stories. I’d say Late Afternoon is the weakest of the four.

Best Documentary Short

Black Sheep
End Game
Lifeboat
A Night at the Garden
Period. End of Sentence.

Lifeboat was the only one of these I didn’t fully appreciate; the others are all excellent. A Night at the Garden was assembled from existing footage of a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden in the 1930s, and runs all of seven minutes; I can’t see voting for that over the others, which are all original works. End Game is the most moving, and devastating. Black Sheep is the most original. Period. End of Sentence. has a wonderful story of female empowerment. I’m fine with any of those three.

Capernaum.

The Lebanese film Capernaum, which landed one of the five nominations for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and took home the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is both a daring effort to tell a grim story through the eyes of a poor child and an exercise in extended misery porn that seems to border on the exploitative. Told with a framing device that never quite works as intended, the story follows a 12-year-old boy who is neglected by his oversized family as he runs away, finds refuge with an undocumented Ethiopian worker, and eventually commits a violent crime that lands him a five-year sentence in juvenile prison.

Zain, played by a novice actor and Syrian refugee named Zain Al Rafeea, has already been convicted of that crime at the start of the film when we meet him as he sues his parents for something that is never that clear, although if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen where he tells the judge he wants his parents to be forced to stop having children. (His mother is pregnant, yet again, during the trial.) Zain and his younger siblings are forced to hustle on the street every day to bring in money for their family, never attending school, until one day his parents discover his eleven-year-old sister, Sahar, has hit puberty, which means they can sell her to the local shopkeeper as a bride. Zain runs away from home and ends up on the street until Tigest, an Ethiopian woman with a baby at home whose existence she’s trying to hide from the world, takes him in, allowing him to take care of her son Yonas during the day while she works. She’s caught in a roundup of illegal immigrants while at work, leaving Zain and Yonas to fend for themselves, setting in motion a spiral of events that ends with Zain in prison.

The story is told in flashbacks between snippets from the civil case, and the framing device works against the film on several levels, not least because it’s unrealistic and serves as a sort of revenge fantasy element against Zain’s parents. (The question of whether his mother has any agency over her reproductive system is never raised; abortion is illegal in Lebanon, and birth control is available but stigmatized.) Writer-director Nadine Labaki, who also appears as Zain’s lawyer, has packed enough ideas in here for a much longer movie, including multiple issues around women’s rights, child labor, immigration laws, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the exploitation of the poor, which results in a movie without any real thematic focus that instead makes Zain’s suffering the core conceit of the plot. His character has an obvious Oliver Twist quality to him, a combination of a strong survival instinct as well as intense empathy for other children who suffer around him, but Labaki uses him like a pinball and keeps tilting the script to make things a little worse for him at every turn until he finally snaps (with reason) and commits the crime for which he’s jailed.

Al Rafeea’s performance as Zain is remarkable, given his background: He’d never acted or had any training, had lived in Lebanon as a Syrian refugee for eight years, and couldn’t read or write. (Labaki has since said that he’s been resettled in Norway, a lightly ironic outcome as the character Zain wants to buy himself passage to Sweden. In the same piece, she says the filmmakers started a fund to try to help other kids shown in the movie who “still live in dire conditions.”) I found him credible in every way, even though the script demands that he portray a broad range of emotions, some of which you would think would be hard to fake, like the empathy he shows for other kids or the contempt in which he holds just about every adult in his life. But the lawsuit is just a gimmick; it’s never clear what the actual claim is, and how Zain gets into that courtroom with his own lawyer is funny but also wildly unrealistic, as are the two feel-good vignettes that wrap up the film. There’s much to recommend in the middle of Capernaum – just about everything involving Zain in the streets is great, and some of the camerawork when he’s running through Beirut’s slums or walking along the side of a highway with cars flying by him is tremendous – but Labaki tried to tackle too much here instead of just letting Zain’s story stand on its own. There’s just no way this should have taken a nomination over the Korean submission, Burning, which is still the best movie I saw from 2018, but didn’t make the final cut.

Cold War.

Pawel Pawlikowski won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2015 for his movie Ida, and returned this year with the critically acclaimed Cold War, distributed by amazon studios, which just earned three Oscar nominations this week for Best Foreign Language Film, Best Cinematography, and, in one of the biggest surprises of the nominations, Best Director. The taut 85-minute, black-and-white drama sets a doomed romance against the backdrop of the Cold War itself, with its two main characters moving back and forth across the Iron Curtain as the political climate tears them apart and their animal magnetism pulls them back together.

Based heavily on the story of Pawlikowski’s own parents, who were musicians in Poland after World War II and split up multiple times before Pawe? was born, Cold War stars Joanna Kulig as Zula and Tomasz Kot as Wiktor, who first meet when Wiktor helps put together a music ensemble to play and honor traditional Polish folk music under the Communist government. Zula has singing talent but lies about her background and experience to con her way into the group, and Wiktor feels an immediate attraction to her that she recognizes and exploits to secure her place at the makeshift academy. This eventually explodes into a passionate affair that leads Wiktor to plan for their defection while their company tours Berlin, only to have Zula choose to stay behind at the last moment, setting in motion a series of meetings and partings over the next fifteen years between Paris, Yugoslavia, and Warsaw, with Zula becoming a jazz singer, Wiktor ending up a political prisoner, and the two absorbing increasing costs to leave each other and come together again.

The pain of parting may be nothing to the joy of meeting again, but Zula and Wiktor are unable to maintain that joy for very long, and begin to tear each other apart – especially Wiktor, who seems to often treat Zula like a prize to be won, or an object to be possessed, as opposed to an independent woman with her own agency. Kulig and Kot have absurd on-screen chemistry that allows Pawlikowski to show virtually nothing while making the desperate passion between the two characters palpable: There’s one love scene where the camera and the actors pause, and we only see Zula’s face, and in the span of under ten seconds the viewer can feel the intensity of this relationship while still understanding that it can never end well.

The decision to shoot the film in black and white appears to have resonated with Academy voters, as both this and Roma landed cinematography nods; Pawlikowski said that color didn’t work when they tried it, as he wanted to replicate the gray bleakness of Poland in the aftermath of the war and the communist takeover. It gives the Polish scenes that depressing air, although it works against the portions of the movie in the nightclubs and salons and ateliers of Paris, where the sense of life is muted … or perhaps that was Pawlikowski’s point, that Zula and Wiktor, as products of the war and the communist regime, can’t fully appreciate or embrace the artistic and personal freedom of the west after their experiences?

Kulig smolders as Zula, moving deftly from ingenue to partner to free spirit to an independent woman who can be petulant and indignant as Wiktor begins to treat her worse the more they’re together. Kot, looking like a slightly older, more rakish Michael Fassbender, drifts more abruptly from dark remove to desperation, as Wiktor’s ability to take Zula for granted once she’s there is completely mystifying, while his single-minded focus on finding her when they’re apart is palpable and easier to understand.

Cold War is short – it’s less than half the length of fellow nominee Never Look Away, which clocks in at 188 minutes – and it zips along once Zula enters the picture, sometimes a little too quickly for some of the tension between the two characters to develop naturally. The film’s ending is problematic, although the last line and shot are both beautiful, in a way I can’t discuss without a huge spoiler; I’ll just say I don’t think it’s adequately set up by the 80 minutes that come before. That puts it behind my big 3 of foreign films from 2018 (Burning, Roma, Shoplifters), but the first 95% of this movie is so good and such a gripping depiction of the familiar story of star-crossed lovers that it’s still a success and worth seeking out.

Shoplifters.

Shoplifters, Japan’s submission for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and a nominee for the same award at the Golden Globes, is a little film with an enormous heart that spends almost all of its two hours on the verge of shattering, asking huge questions about the meaning of family without providing any easy answers. It won the top prize at Cannes, the Palme d’Or, this past May, and is out in U.S. art theaters now.

The family at the heart of the film includes Osamu Shibata and young Shota Shibata, who work as a team of shoplifters to cope with their poverty, as Osamu says that items in a store belong to nobody until someone purchases them. Coming home from one such escapade, they spot a very young girl, four or five, named Yuri, playing outside in the cold, alone, with scars on her arms that point to child abuse. They take her in, and her arrival in the household – which includes Osamu’s wife, Nobuyo; her young sister, Aki; and Hatsue*, whom they all call “Grandma” – changes the dynamic within their tiny apartment, at first causing strife (such as Shota’s jealousy) but eventually bringing some of them closer to each other and causing them to act much more like a family, culminating in a big day out to the beach for Yuri’s first time seeing the ocean. Over the course of the film, director/writer Kore-eda Hirokazu gradually reveals the actual relationships among these different characters, who form a family by choice rather than by blood, opening up questions of what it means to be a family and how much we need those relationships to thrive. Of course, this situation can’t last, and when a shoplifting trip goes off the rails, the family is caught, and no one escapes unscathed from the aftermath.

* The actress who played Grandma, Kiki Kirin, passed away in September at the age of 75, after the film’s release in Japan.

Although Shoplifters never stops moving – there’s barely any silence in the film, as the characters are always talking, even if it’s about the most mundane matters – almost everything that happens in the script is there to highlight some facet of the family’s dynamic, and how these people, all misfits of some sort, have come together to fill in the voids in their lives left by the absence of a proper family. Nobuyo and Hatsue have a running conversation throughout the film about whether family is better when you choose it, rather than when it’s chosen for you; Nobuyo thinks the bond is stronger when it’s one you chose. Even though Shota, who, as you might have guessed, isn’t actually Osamu and Nobuyo’s son, and Yuri were kidnapped, they were also both taken from situations where their families neglected or abused them, and taken into a household where they were provided with love and affection – which doesn’t excuse the kidnapping, certainly not in the eyes of the authorities, but again raises the question of what happens to us when our biological families don’t give us what we need.

None of the adult characters has clean hands in this story, and Kore-eda takes pains to avoid lionizing them for their poverty or absolving them of their sins for their kindness towards Shota and Yuri. Aki’s parents think she’s studying abroad (maybe), but she’s actually working in a peep show parlor, where she may be falling in love with a customer. Grandma milks her late husband’s family for regular gifts, but complains about their parsimony. Nobuyo and Osamu have a bigger secret that isn’t revealed till the tail end of the film, as well as the true story of how and where they found Shota. Kore-eda has given his characters good intentions, but each shows an entirely human failure of execution, while the various authorities, from a shady landlord to the investigators who eventually find the family, all seem able to execute while suffering from an absence of heart.

You’ll want a happy ending for these characters by the end of Shoplifters, especially for the two kids, but it just wouldn’t be realistic, and doing so would undermine the points Kore-eda is trying to make with his melancholy story. Characters who don’t fit in anywhere, who live on the margins of society and take the family they can build because the world hasn’t given them another one, aren’t going to get that kind of resolution.

Sakura Ando is especially affecting as Nobuyo, whose history we see in glimpses that hint at past tragedies, and who ultimately sacrifices more than anyone else to try to make things right for Shota. Both kids are played by first-time actors – Kairi J? (Jo), who plays Shota, looks like he’s going to lead a J-pop boy band at some point, while tiny Miyu Sasaki, playing Yuri, has a knack for heart-melting facial expressions, especially amazing for someone who was just five or six when this was filmed.

Embed from Getty Images

J?, Sasaki, and Mayu Matsuoka (Aki)

Shoplifters even beat out Burning at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards for best film, and both should be nominated for Oscars in the Best Foreign Language Film category, although that one seems like it’s Roma‘s to lose. It’s such a lovely, heartbreaking film, with such universal themes, that it’s worth seeking out near you while it’s still playing in independent theaters.

Roma.

Alfonso Cuarón’s passion project Roma, his first film as director in five years and just his eighth feature film since his debut in 1991, has already become the most-lauded movie of 2018, and it’s easily one of the best I’ve seen this year. It looks different from anything else I’ve watched, it sounds incredible, and the script finds a seemingly impossible equilibrium between the tension of its story and the lyrical quality of both the setting and the way Cuarón layers the scenes with moving cameras.

Based on Cuarón’s childhood, growing up in the Colonia Roma neighborhood in Mexico City, Roma shows us this story through the eyes of the family’s maid, Cleo, played by first-time actress and preschool teacher Yalitza Aparicio. Cleo, a woman of Mixteco ancestry who speaks that language to other servants but Spanish to the family, and another servant Adela seem to handle everything for the family, as the father is emotionally absent when there and then physically leaves the film not that long after it begins, while the mother seems incapable of handling even basic domestic chores – or just unwilling to do so. Cleo cooks, cleans, puts the kids to bed, wakes them up, dresses them for school, takes them there, picks them up, and more, while the mother, Sofia, watches and occasionally criticizes, when she’s not dealing with an obviously breaking marriage to Antonio.

Cleo’s story eventually takes center stage when she becomes pregnant by Fermin, a young, feckless man, obsessed with martial arts, who naturally leaves her the moment he finds out she’s expecting. Along the way, we see the resolution of the issue with Sofia and Antonio’s marriage, the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre of antigovernment protesters by a PRI-backed paramilitary group, the tensions between landowners and tenants outside of Mexico City, and the divides of race and class that separate Cleo and Adela from the children they care for every day. Almost everything that happens in the movie is serious, even heavy, from a marriage imploding to an unplanned pregnancy to political unrest to, eventually, a threat to some of the main characters, yet the film is often silly or sweetly funny, especially when it comes to Sofia’s attempts to drive the family’s oversized car or Fermin’s naked display of toxic masculinity.

If Roma had been a major American studio release with a big budget and dialogue in English, the posters could easily have used the tagline “Cancel All Men.” Every male character in this film is some sort of terrible, with Antonio and Fermin competing for the title of worst. Cleo is the heart of the movie and the only character to get full development; the kids are more like props, and Sofia is often shown in shadow because we see her through Cleo’s eyes. The necessity for Sofia, Cleo, and Sofia’s mother to carry on in Antonio’s absence in a culture that clearly doesn’t respect women the way it respects men is never made explicit but is a clear undercurrent throughout the story. Cuarón populates the film with lesser male characters as well – the chauvinist doctor who doesn’t think Sofia’s (female) obstetrician is up to the task, the random creep who decides Sofia needs ‘cheering up,’ even the comic Professor Zovek (played by the Mexican wrestler known as Latin Lover), whose outfit should have left more to the imagination.

As compelling as the plot can be at times – the protests, the delivery, the beach scene near the conclusion – Roma is an even better technical achievement. Shot in black and white, filmed by Cuarón himself after his regular cinematographer couldn’t commit to the full three and a half months for the project, Roma plays out like a fugue for the eyes, with cameras often moving laterally at a different pace from the characters they’re following, with characters in the backdrop moving at yet another pace. (If I see this again, I’d like to just try to watch what’s happening in the background, as there was never enough time to focus on that and the main characters, but I always knew there was more to see if I shifted my gaze.) The quality and pervasive sense given by the sound is just as remarkable; even watching at home, without any high-end equipment, I felt immersed by the sound of the waves in that beach scene, so much so that I was mildly relieved I hadn’t seen it in the theater because it might have been overwhelming. Cuarón seems to have made this film to put viewers into a specific atmosphere of time and place, using these visual and auditory techniques to do so, and it works, well enough to make up for the lack of strong characters beyond Cleo or the non-traditional nature of the plot, which has several smaller, interlocking arcs rather than a single narrative that takes us from start to finish.

Roma has already won top honors from film critics’ groups in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York (three different such bodies), San Francisco, Toronto, and Washington, although it was ineligible for the Golden Globe category for Best Motion Picture – Drama. (The Golden Globes can be a fun telecast, but their movie awards and nominees the last two years have been awful.) It seems like Roma is a dead lock in two categories at the Oscars, for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Cinematography, and should earn nominations in Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Sound Editing at the very least. I’d love to see Aparicio get a Best Actress nomination, but that seems like an unrealistic hope given her much more famous competition; I’d certainly give her the nod over Glenn Close (The Wife) or Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), both of whom are currently in the top five on GoldDerby.com’s Oscar odds. I still have a few contenders left to see, but this and Burning are the two best films I’ve seen so far in 2018.