Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven is a sumptuous homage to the movies of Douglas Sirk that is elevated beyond pastiche by its gripping emotional center.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 11, 2025

It’s a ballsy move, molding your film so closely to a peerless classic, but Todd Haynes transcends thin pastiche to be a genuinely great film of its own.

| Original Score: 78/100 | Aug 12, 2023

In meticulously refashioning Sirk’s surfaces, Haynes isn’t revealing what Sirk hid. He’s just showing that what we saw is still what we see.

| Apr 15, 2023

This is a masterpiece of a film that 20 years post release still looks and feels like an important piece of cinema.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Jul 19, 2022

Far From Heaven leaves American life and society essentially untouched. The film is simply not alive to the enormous social contradictions existing under the surface in the 1950s.

| Feb 16, 2021

When a movie gets it all impeccably, heartbreakingly right, as does Todd Haynes' stunning Far from Heaven, some critics are tempted to gush deepest purple...I'll try to stay anchored to more sensible levels of bliss.

| Mar 16, 2020

Perhaps one of the most remarkable tributes by one filmmaker to another ever made.

| Original Score: 4/4 | May 18, 2019

Writer-director Todd Haynes' modern masterpiece wasn't merely the best film of 2002; it also ranked as one of the 10 best films of its decade.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 23, 2019

Haynes was miraculously able to provide a commentary on class, gender and race relations that not only dissected the utopian fallacy of '50s America but made it resonate today

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 15, 2018

I'll say two things about an Oscar nomination for Julianne Moore for best actress: for sure and at least.

| Original Score: A- | Jan 4, 2018

With a classic storytelling style bordering on corniness, a deft tragicomic touch and a heroic refusal to use the safety net of irony, Haynes has managed to produce something of a gem.

| Jan 3, 2018

Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid are outstanding as Cathy and Frank Whitaker, a perfect couple with a decidedly imperfect love life.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 3, 2015

Far From Heaven should create a wider audience for Haynes, long considered one of America's leading independent directors.

| Apr 1, 2014

The actors move about this elaborate movie museum in a modified dream state, as if living in the present while rooted in the past. But the strategy doesn't work. It's an imitation of lifelessness.

| Apr 1, 2014

We are left wondering why, in any case, an imitation Sirk was needed, what appetite or interest it might fill. Even with its latter-day (modified) frankness, Far From Heaven is only thin glamour that lacks a tacit wry base.

| Apr 1, 2014

With tact and care, the movie digs into all the subjects that lay concealed below the surface when Max Ophuls and Douglas Sirk were filming their own melodramas in the nineteen-fifties.

| Apr 1, 2014

Quaid makes a decent man's anguish richly palpable. Moore makes us feel hidden frenzy with a cool and ultimately heartbreaking grace.

| Apr 1, 2014

Haynes doesn't simply take a Norman Rockwell setting and release the hounds, either. He deals with these issues directly, but gently, as if his and Sirk's audiences were the same.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Apr 1, 2014

Todd Haynes has crafted a feature-length homage to Sirk that succeeds both on its own terms and as the Sirk film that could never have been made in his own lifetime.

| Apr 1, 2014

Could Haynes go on making films if the health police were ever to let up? He apparently needs to define himself in opposition to their controlling mindset.

| Apr 1, 2014