Alfonso Cuaron's masterful remembrance

No point beating around the bush, Roma is the year's best movie.

I have a suggestion that might enhance your appreciation of Roma, the Alfonso Cuaron movie that rightly has been hailed as a masterpiece. If you possibly can see the movie, shot in black and white and making exquisite use of a wide-screen format, do so. Then go to Netflix and watch the movie in the original Spanish with the sound off. I think you'll see just how much of Cuaron's semi-autobiographical memory movie communicates visually.

Sounds obvious, I know. But think about how much most movies rely on dialogue, music and flashy edits to get their point -- if they have one -- across. Cuaron, who also served as the movie's cinematographer, has made an image-rich movie that relies on his camera to capture the lives of characters and expand beyond that to provide insight into the society in which they live.

Working at peak form, Cuaron, at one point, approaches a single street as a canvas, gliding his camera along its length in a way that brings the chaos and vibrancy of Mexico during the 1970s to life.

Mexico City provides the stage on which Cuaron sets the story of the household in which he presumably grew up. His neighborhood was called Roma, a slice of the city in which residents lived behind locked gates and employed help to keep their households running.

The movie's amazing opening shot, the slow reveal of an airplane reflected in pools of water from a maid's daily cleaning of the family's courtyard -- suggests faraway life, something out of reach for the movie's main character, Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio). She's the maid who keeps the machinery of the house oiled. Her duties include everything from cleaning up dog poop in the courtyard to doing laundry by hand on the roof to comforting the family's four children.

The meticulously kept downstairs of the house contrasts with the messy upstairs, where most of the actual living takes place. It quickly becomes apparent that trouble looms. When the head of the house (Fernando Grediaga) arrives home, he barely squeezes his over-sized Ford into its courtyard parking spot. It's as if something about him has outgrown the life inside.

It's not long before, Dad -- a physician by trade -- leaves home on a "business" trip. He doesn't return and Mom (Marina de Tavira) begins to unravel. Cleo also has an experience with a fleeing male.

She dates a young man (Jorge Manuel Guerrero Mendoza) who happens to be the cousin of the boyfriend of another of the household's maids (Nancy Garcia). After Cleo and Mendoza's Fermin have sex, he emerges from the bathroom naked and does a bizarre martial arts demonstration that serves as a kind of stark primer on Mexican machismo.

It's immediately clear that Fermin isn't going to win any sensitivity contests. Later, Cleo tells him, as they're necking in a movie theater, that she's pregnant; he excuses himself to go to the bathroom and never returns.

An awful lot happens during Roma, but the movie never feels stuffed. Not only do we become intimately acquainted with the household in which Cleo works, but we're immersed in events of the day - from an earthquake to student protests that turn violent and serve as a prelude to the movie's most devastatingly painful scenes.

At one point, Mom decides to take the family to visit rich friends for a New Year's celebration. Cuaron then assembles a sequence that includes hunting, pistol firing and some of the most bizarre examples of taxidermy yet to be seen on film.

Suddenly, we're in Fellini territory, but we've arrived without self-conscious attempts at mimicry or insider gestures. It's all part of the fabric that Cauron weaves and which includes a visit to the poor part of the city where Cleo attempts to reconnect with the vanished Fermin.

Cuaron's juxtaposition of the bizarre and the quotidian never feels forced and Roma unfolds with such apparent effortlessness that its truth seems unquestionable.

When the family takes a beach vacation, Cuaron does stunning work as his camera follows Cleo into the waves. I won't say more about what she's doing, but -- as is the case with much of the movie -- I watched with amazement at the effect Cuaron achieves.

Cleo genuinely loves the children of the household and they clearly love her. Of course, there's an inherent inequality in the relative positions of employer and employee that adds a painful undercurrent to everything that transpires.

Cuaron obviously is one of the boys in this on-screen family, but Roma isn't about children or even childhood; it's a movie about a moment and the people who lived it.

So back to where I started. I encourage you to see this movie twice. Get the lay of the land, know the story and then see it without sound so that you can fully appreciate the wonder of Cuaron's camera work, the exactitude of his eye and the clarity of a heart that understands the deep sadness and transient beauty of fading time.

'Gravity' and the loneliness of space

Director Alfonso Cuaron makes us feel as if we're tumbling through space.

Seen from our minuscule perspective, space is a lonely place, a void that leaves us awestruck at its vastness and perhaps terrified about the possibility of its unending lifelessness. At various points in the new movie Gravity, we're made to feel the solitary magnitude of a depopulated universe.

The key word in the previous sentence is "feel." Director Alfonso Cuaron and his technical team have made a movie in which zero gravity becomes the norm. We not only observe what's happening, we experience it in sensorially powerful ways.

All movies do this to an extent, but because Gravity takes place in space -- even with Earth in full view of the movie's orbiting astronauts -- nothing feels typical. We tumble through the movie like an untethered astronaut somersaulting through space. And when things go wrong, the agony is felt more deeply because the astronauts still can see the Earth.

Unlike what happens in many sic-fi movies, the characters are not embarked on a journey to some forbidding planet. They've put a toe in the inky waters of space. No more.

Thematically and for sheer grandeur, Gravity is not the equal of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but it rivals that movie in its insistence on creating -- with help from effectively used 3-D photography -- the experience people in space might actually have.

As astronauts, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney are first seen working on the Hubble Telescope. Even though they're encumbered by bulky space suits, they're like space babies floating in the amniotic fluids of the universe.

The dialogue in a script by Cuaron and his son Jonas, doesn't try to create poetry; it's unnecessary. We see the poetry, as Gravity offers us looming views of the planet we all call home.

Despite its apparent lack of mystical fervor, Gravity should not be seen as a cinematic amusement park ride, space like you've never seen it before. Cuaron has a simple story to tell, one involving grief and possible renewal.

Clooney's Matt Kowalski is the mission's captain. Clooney tempers the captain's all-business approach with jaunty humor and confidence; he has the poise of a man who has faced danger many times and who knows how to remain unrattled, or at least how to pretend that he's calm.

The two astronauts are threatened when they're bombarded by debris from a Soviet satellite, putting them in the middle of a terrifying shower of flying metal.

At that point, Gravity becomes a story of survival, simple under any other circumstances, but not in this case because everything we see is taking place in space. To further augment the tension, the astronauts lose radio contact with Earth. They're on their own, Robinson Crusoes without the benefit of an island on which to seek refuge.

Bullock spends a lot of time on the screen alone. She's climbing in and out of space suits, at times floating inside a space capsule in her underwear. Humans are a talkative lot, and in moments of isolation and near-panic, Bullock's Ryan talks to herself -- trying to hold steady, reviewing things from her past and working as her own counselor.

Gravity is the kind of masterful movie that stands as a triumph of contemporary moviemaking craft, using sound and the lack of it to great advantage. Cuaron may have made the most astonishingly representative movie of his time, a film in which the technical achievements are unparalleled and entirely intrinsic to the story's meaning.

As an experience that puts you into space, Gravity has few real rivals. We feel unmoored, dislocated and, most of all, vulnerable in the dark beauty of space, Earth glowing in the distance, a beacon of luminosity in an otherwise empty universe.

Most of the time, Gravity, which unfolds over an economical but absorbing 90 minutes, thrives on the intensity of situations that force its characters to react quickly. Every moment seems to involve a life-or-death decision.

In the rare moments when we catch our breath, Gravity gives us productive pause; its setting makes us wonder whether -- like Bullock's Ryan -- we all aren't really talking only to ourselves, even as we reach for the stars.