Sight & Sound names Roma best film of 2018

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Popular film magazine Sight & Sound has crowned Roma as the best film of 2018.

Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, the film has swiftly become a frontrunner in the awards conversation, after being named Best Picture by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the Chicago Film Critics Association – all early indicators of which films will shine when it comes to next year's Academy Awards.

If the film does land a Best Picture nomination, it would be considered something of an outlier, as it's a black-and-white film not in the English language. These are both qualities rarely rewarded by mainstream awards.

The film, drawing from Cuarón's own childhood, follows the life of Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio), a maid to a middle-class family in 1970s Mexico City.

The Independent's Geoffrey Macnab called Roma "brilliantly observed" with "an intense sense of yearning, lyricism and emotional truthfulness running through its every frame."

Conducted through a survey of 164 critics from across the globe, the publication's top five saw Roma followed by Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread, Lee Chang-dong's Burning, Paweł Pawlikowski's Cold War, and Paul Schrader's First Reformed.

The rest of the top ten included Debra Granik's Leave No Trace, Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite, Lynne Ramsay's You Were Never Really Here, Alice Rohrwacher's Happy as Lazzaro, and Lucrecia Martel's Zama.

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