Rhythms

"Roma" by Alfonso Cuaron

"Roma"'s brilliance comes also from its rhythms.   They express themselves in small and big scales.  They connect social and political with personal.  "Roma" says that there is balance between various layers of our existence that there is something larger than a single layer of our perception of the world, that "so above as below,"  or "everything is everything."

We tell each other stories usually favoring one aspect of reality over others, "Roma" gets it all  enveloped in one giant sigh of wonder over our dramas, defeats and victories.  A true masterpiece.

If you seek reviews of "Roma" note how ridiculous and wrong is the one by Richard Brody in the New Yorker.  It is a perfect (although unintended) caricature of a socially concerned liberal intellectual blinded by political correctness. 

Consequences

"Cold War", directed by Pawel Pawlikowski

"Cold War" is audacious.  The storytelling there doesn't focus on the process, motivations, plot points, foreshadowing and all the other classical stuff.  Instead it jumps from consequence to consequence.   By doing so it sucks the viewer into the drama and makes the relationship it tells non banal and non predictable.  It restores the sense of mystery into the process of telling a story.   It had to happen as a reaction to a more and more oppressive Aristotelian or Hollywood dictum.