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

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

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

Haynes' loving homage to the Technicolor female-driven melodramas of the 1950s looks and feels so authentic, it will make you forget you are watching a new movie.

| Apr 1, 2014

Sensitive, mature melodrama about sexuality in the 1950s.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 24, 2010

An accomplished marriage of elaborate style and content.

| Feb 11, 2008

It may be a movie about movies, but the artifice doesn't contradict the movie's plangent emotional realism. Moore's stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film's brave, double-edged beauty.

| Nov 1, 2007

Exultant in both its artifice and its cruel honesty, it's a movie Sirk would make today - and, as such, it's quite brilliant.

| Jan 26, 2006

Haynes is interested in exploring deeper issues than a little country-club gossip. And he makes sure that the pretty pictures don't lead us to forget that.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 19, 2004

This is a film made as if it was created and put together in the 1950's, and that aesthetic eschews the rapid fire patterns and short attention span platitudes of many modern films.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 19, 2003

This would have been the best 'women's picture' ever made in '50s Hollywood - if anyone had been courageous enough to make it then. It's gorgeous to behold, the actors are wonderful, and Haynes' precise vision and control never waver.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Mar 30, 2003

Heartbreaking and uncannily accurate.

| Mar 25, 2003

Far from Heaven may not be the most spontaneous film you'll see this year. But in its own dippy way, it's bound to be one of the most heartfelt.

| Mar 7, 2003

It's worth seeing for Quaid's multileveled, perfectly modulated, frankly amazing performance.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2003