Roma

An aging, caustic (but good hearted) author has a young writer type up his autobiography, and we see his mostly Utopian childhood, the loss of his beloved father, his love affairs in his early 20s, and his relationship with his wonderful mother, the title character.

All of this is set against the background of the changing, ever worsening politics of Argentina.

A film I couldn't quite love, but also couldn't help but quite like.

It's a little shallow for a 2:30 hour epic tale of a man's life, but it's also always interesting, and the whole thing is well acted , and has both a charm and sadness, along with characters who can sometimes be surprising. I enjoyed it more, not less on a second viewing, which makes sense since the plot isn't what's special, but the details.

Few times in my life I have seen such an intense drama. Intense in the dialogues, superb in acting. The life as it is, not an idealized bit of it, as in conventional films. Characters are deep, well developed, they don't act the standards, but seem to be much more "human" than in conventional stories. Almost every scene is a virtuoso acting near-monologue. But you have rests, including the whole Chopin nocturne's filmed in a way that, only with the actor's expressions, something is still happening into the characters, and the story doesn't suffer for such a long quiet time. Yoy can save a lot of dialogs as a treasure. OK, it is not as much as an archetype of filming language. OK, it is nearly theater. But only nearly. I cannot imagine me enjoying all of the subtleties in actor's faces from so far, in a theater. A tasty drama, full of good philosophy about life, love and feelings, expressed trough complex characters and scenes. Too bad for those who find it "slow" or "overlong"... in my opinion, they just didn't catch it. To me is seemed pretty dense, full of things... I couldn't stick out until the end. I didn't like it. Just the last minute. But it is my opinion. All the rest is more than enough to make the movie a masterpiece. In my opinion.

I stumbled upon "Roma" a few nights ago on the HBO Latin channel. I seldom watch Spanish programming, but when I clicked on the program grid for some information on the film, I saw the movie's locale was Buenos Aires. My parents were portenos from Buenos Aires and I have been to Buenos Aires a few times, most recently last October, so I decided to watch.

The movie itself did not impress me. It was "ok"...a talky character study. Not a bad movie, but nothing out of the ordinary either. But...I enjoyed the movie immensely because the actors spoke just as my parents spoke, in the Argentine "porteno" dialect of Buenos Aires. It was like going back to my childhood. I speak Spanish reasonably well (but English is my "first" language) and I hear people speaking Spanish all the time at work, but they are not from Argentina. As soon as the movie started and I heard the actors speaking, I could tell is was that old familiar Argentine dialect...the cadence, the inflections, etc., are so unique. I told my sister about the movie...even though she understands little Spanish, I told her to watch or rent this movie if she could because she most likely would be transported back to our childhood as I was.

Elaine Clearwater FL

I happened to watch this film on "the small screen" in Spanish, which was somewhat of a challenge. My linguistic limitations notwithstanding, I felt intrigued enough to put in the effort to follow the dialogue, pacing, and emotional pull. I have not seen other works by this director, but felt rewarded for my time. It was refreshing to see a film discuss philosophy and intellectual points in the context of a Latin American family. The plot revolves around a mother and son through time, utilizing media references such as scenes from the film Grapes of Wrath to embellish this central theme. I enjoyed revisiting the 60s and 70s in Roma, the classical lines and designs, Jazz and literature references. A thinking person's film, regardless of one's language capacity.

A journalist arrives to a writer's home to help him to make an autobiography, there, as he tells his life, we can remember all his good and bad moments that caused a scar in his existence. A movie with a typical Argentinian style: great actors with a very well structured screenplay and a touching and hard story. unfortunately, as usual in Argentinian films, it is too much slow, and than can make it boring sometimes, in the same way, its enormous duration (2 hours and a half) makes it more difficult to enjoy indeed. It has very very good acting. However, its duration and its lack of rhythm mess a little the result; with 30 minutes less of film it would have been better.