Alfonso Cuarón's first feature, the state funded Sólo con tu pareja (1991), has been cited as an early manifestation of a key genre of the neoliberal era of 1990s and the subsequent box office boom of 1999–2001 – the romantic comedy (MacLaird 2013a: 48; Sánchez Prado 2014: 63). Genre has continued to be a feature in all of Cuarón's post Sólo con tu pareja features, both in terms of his Mexican made and deterritorialised productions including; the studio/ industry projects made as ‘director for hire’ in the United States and the United Kingdom – novel adaptations A Little Princess (1995), Great Expectations (1998) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) – and the auteurist projects made in Mexico and the United Kingdom – the privately funded Y tu mamá también (co-written with his brother Carlos 2001), the studio funded Children of Men (2006) and Gravity (co-written with his son Jonás 2013).

It is perhaps the association with genre in his English language films that led the New York film critic J. Hoberman, in a blog post about Gravity, to call Cuarón ‘nobody's idea of an auteur’ (Hoberman 2013). Hoberman's comment is less a value judgement on Cuarón (who did after all go on to win the Oscar for Best Director for Gravity in 2014) and more a reflection on how traditional auteurist studies, as André Bazin's critique points out, tended not to consider genre directors true ‘auteurs’ because the ‘standardisation’ genre implies was considered inhibiting to ‘the creation and development of film’ as an art form (Ryall 1998: 327).

Subsequently, of course, in film studies, ideas changed so that genre and auteurism could usefully coexist in a system in which the former provided a useful ‘framework’ within which directors could express themselves (McArthur cited in Ryall 1998: 327). However, a residual mistrust of genre remains the norm in some film criticism and is evident in the way Cuarón's films are approached: certain discipline-related imperatives encourage scholars to ignore genre and mainstream filmmaking.