Roma (2018) ****

It took a while to get motivated to watch “Roma,” even though it's been streaming on Netflix for weeks. The black-and-white, Spanish language Oscar-bait has been described as director Alfonso Cuaron's love letter to Mexico City, and touted for telling the story of a maid/nanny, an “indigenous woman who is usually in the background.” Sounds like a real snooze-fest, right? Well, truth be told, the movie does start out pretty slow, but you gotta ride it out, because it's actually really good.

We meet Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a maid for a moderately-wealthy doctor and his family. She cleans and looks after the kids and gossips with her co-worker, Adela (Nancy Garcia Garcia), the cook. It's hard to guess these girls' ages, but they are probably only around 20 years old. They are loved by the family's four children, but for the parents, they mostly exist in the background of family life.

That's the point Cuaron is trying to make in “Roma.” Here, the focus is on Cleo's life, and the doctor and his wife, Sofia (Marina de Tavira), are in the background of her life. While their upper-middle-class marriage is falling apart, Cleo is lovingly raising their kids and spending her free time dating shifty guys from the slums. I don't want to give away any more of what little plot there is. There isn't some sinister plot or big twist. This is really just a slice-of-life kind of story. It's a tale of two seemingly very different women (Sofia and Cleo) pulling themselves through adversity and supporting each other. The strength is not in the minimal plot, but in the incredibly natural performances of the actresses.

Roger Ebert once said that movies are “a machine for generating empathy,” and “Roma” does just that. It allows us to really experience Cleo's life, including the love she has for Sofia's kids, and the love they return to her. (Alfonso Cuaron was raised by a nanny like Cleo, which he gives as a reason for wanting to tell this story.) Star Yalitza Aparicio had no prior acting experience. Her job is admittedly made easier by the fact that, as an indigenous woman, Cleo is naturally rather stoic and unexpressive. All the more remarkable, then, that she is able to make us feel so much. Marina de Tavira is also excellent as a wife picking herself up after being abandoned by her feckless husband.

Cuaron uses black-&-white film to stunning effect in “Roma.” The film doesn't take us to majestic vistas, but the cinematography makes ordinary places look stunning. An especially beautiful scene involves Sofia's extended family fighting a wildfire in the countryside.

“Roma” is not for everyone. It's an artsy, slowly-paced, foreign language film. If you dig this kind of thing, though, you will not want to let this film slip past you.

4 stars out of 5

Annihilation (2018) **

“Annihilation,” by writer/director Alex Garland (“Ex Machina” “28 Days Later” “Never Let Me Go”), is pretty good science fiction up to a certain point. That point occurs about 20 seconds into the film, which opens with a meteor burning through the atmosphere and striking the ground near a lighthouse. It's decent stuff. Then we switch over to biologist Lena (Natalie Portman) giving an obnoxiously pretentious pre-med lecture, and the film is really all downhill from there.

Lena, we learn, is mourning the loss of her missing-in-action, military husband, Kane. Then, mysteriously, Kane shows up at their house, disoriented and sick. On the way to the hospital, Lena and Kane are kidnapped and taken to a government facility near the lighthouse where the asteroid landed. From a remarkably forthcoming psychologist (Jennifer Jason Leigh), we learn that for 3 years, a shimmery force field has been slowly spreading out from the site. They can't see or detect anything beyond “the shimmer,” and every team sent in to investigate has simply disappeared. Kane is the first person to come back out, and he has no memory of anything, and seems to be dying.

Lena volunteers to join the psychologist and 3 other female scientists on a mission into the shimmer. There, they experience time disorientation and progressive mental deterioration as they explore an apocalyptic landscape of beautiful and dangerous genetic mutations.

There's no reason this couldn't be a fun concept, but with “Annihilation,” a talented director and cast somehow managed to create a complete dud. First and foremost, Lena sucks all the joy out of whatever room she's in. Even in flashbacks of her life before Kane disappeared, their relationship seems mostly stale and miserable. Jennifer Jason Leigh's character isn't exactly brimming with personality, either. Tessa Thompson is talented and gorgeous, but she's totally wasted here.

Then there's the “science” in this film. I was okay with the mixing of plant and animal DNA going on inside the shimmer, and I wish they had explored those possibilities more. I was mostly willing to go along with the ridiculous footage of dividing cells that Lena views through her portable microscope. But when Thompson's character explains that the shimmer is “diffracting” genes the same way it diffracts light and radio waves, I was ready to bail.

What you basically have here is a less trashy version of the movie "Species," and that's not a complement. “Species” also wasted some great actors on a ridiculous film, but at least it had all those Natasha Henstridge nude scenes. “Annihilation” could have used some of that, assuming that a better script, acting, and direction weren't an option. This film actually got a lot of good reviews, but I think it's a bore. That meteor in the opening scene is the high point.

2 stars out of 5

Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) ****

Queen is one of those bands that it's easy to take for granted. Their music has been around my entire life, and even now, at any given moment, I guarantee you there's a Queen song playing on a classic rock station somewhere. I can remember my delight at discovering certain of their songs, like “Fat-Bottomed Girls” and “Bohemian Rhapsody,” while other songs, like “We Will Rock You,” just feel like they have always been out there in the background somewhere.

A music biopic is a great way to showcase an old artist's music and get you to take a new look at it, and “Bohemian Rhapsody” is one of the best I have seen. Much like 1991's “The Doors,” the film gives us access to moments of creation for songs that are so ubiquitous that we may have assumed they always existed.

The film starts with Freddie Mercury fortuitously meeting guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor right after they lost the lead singer of their struggling band. Impressed with his voice, they offer Freddy a spot, and the rest, as they say, is history. Re-dubbed “Queen,” after Her Royal Majesty, the band slowly worked its way to the top with its unique, operatic, rock stylings.

As much as the music, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is about Freddie Mercury, presenting his life as a constant struggle against loneliness and isolation. He was the child of Farsi Zoroastrians from Zanzibar. His people were a religious minority chased out of Iran by the Muslims, so there is basically nowhere on earth where Mercury could truly fit in. Growing up in England, people simply called him a “Paki.” Later in his life, his homosexuality made him an outsider.

Speaking of Mercury's sexuality, there has been some bitching among the chattering class that the film glosses over his gayness or is homophobic in some way. I'm not sure what movie they were watching. For most of the film, Mercury is as openly gay as any artist was allowed to be in the 1970s and 80s, and the movie concludes with him entering into a relationship with his long-term partner Jim Hutton. I guess you just can't satisfy people who are obsessed with identity politics.

For the rest of us, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is a true delight, reintroducing great music and great musicians. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll bang your head!

4 stars out of 5

Blackkklansman (2018) ****

Director Spike Lee has never been known for subtlety, and he isn't about to start being subtle now, in his story of Ron Stalworth, the real-life black cop who infiltrated the KKK. Based on Stalworth's book, “Black Klansman,” Lee's film is as bold and in-your-face as any of his work, and, in case you wondered, Lee does change the story quite a bit for dramatic effect.

In real life, Stalworth (played by John David Washington), the first black officer on the Colorado Springs police force, responded to a recruiting ad for the local Ku Klux Klan chapter. Using his “whitest” voice, he spouted racist rhetoric about blacks and Jews, and ingratiated himself with the chapter president. He then got a white officer to pose as Ron Stalworth to meet and join the group. The two gathered intelligence on the Klan, including the involvement of several active military personnel. They also became quite friendly with National Grand Wizard David Duke, much to his eventual embarrassment.

It's a great story, and Spike Lee gussies it up with some dramatic flourishes, including a bomb plot, and making Stalworth's partner (Adam Driver) Jewish. Like I said, Lee isn't known for his subtlety. Fortunately, the stellar cast is good enough to make up for most of the film's excesses. Washington (son of Denzel) and Driver are funny and convincing. Laura Harrier, who plays Stalworth's love interest, is cute as a button, and Topher Grace plays a spot-on David Duke. The best performance, however, may come from Jasper Paakkonen, who is absolutely chilling as a Klansman who is suspicious of Stalworth, adding some menace to the operation.

It's always hard for me to tell if Spike Lee understands that race relations are a two-way street, if he is just suspicious of whites and sympathetic to blacks, or a little of both. The film includes a long speech by Kwame Ture, who warns his young, black audience that a race war is coming, mirroring the race-war talk of the Klan members. Ture encourages violence against “racist, white cops,” and the film includes examples of abusive policemen who make it easy to sympathize with that stance. You get the feeling, though, that Ture wouldn't mind much if his audience just used “cops” as shorthand, or maybe even “whites.” Later, Harry Belafonte appears as activist Jerome Turner, describing a horrific lynching to a group of black students, and his talk ends with chants of “Black Power” intercut with scenes of Klansmen chanting “White Power.” Is Lee suggesting that black radicals and white radicals have some things in common? It doesn't seem characteristic of Lee, but seeing these scenes juxtaposed makes me wonder.

Then again, Lee finishes up the movie with footage of the 2017 Charlottesville, VA riots, including the deadly car attack, making it pretty clear where his sympathies lie. For me, the overt political message turns this from a 5-star film to a 4-star one. The music, costumes, script, and performances are stellar, but the sermonizing undermines the outstanding source material. Given a great story like Ron Stalworth's, Lee could have made a shorter, better, more powerful movie, and the racial message would have spoken for itself.

4 stars out of 5