The easy descriptors for Todd Haynes's take on Patricia Highsmith’s tale of socially unacceptable female relationships during the early ’50s are words like “sumptuous,” “ravishing,” and maybe “entrancing” (that last thanks to a command performance from Cate Blanchett as a failed wife, loving mother, and motherly lover). But the more …
Todd Haynes tackles pollution.
The mating dance of a trailblazing, best-selling feminist author and a men's-magazine hedonist revives the Rock Hudson and Doris Day series of bedroom comedies, right down to the re-creation of the original period (1962) and the presence on screen of Tony Randall (although David Hyde Pierce takes the role that …
At the outset, Todd Haynes carries us on a crane over a Peyton Place-y town square (or square town) and into the glossy world of the 1950s "women's picture." It is mildly amazing how straight he plays it, or anyway how deadpan, although there are nonetheless as many laughs as …
Todd Haynes blows another cloud of mist into the mystique of Bob Dylan. The filmmaker, who once enlisted Barbie dolls to tell the Karen Carpenter story, now borrows a gimmick used by Todd Solondz in Palindromes, employing a rotation of dissimilar actors to play a single role, a multiplication of …
Twenty years after their notorious tabloid romance gripped the nation, a married couple buckles under pressure when an actress arrives to do research for a film about their past. Directed by Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine) and starring Julianne Moore, Natalie Portman, and Charles Melton.
Low-profile science fiction, so light on the hardware, the décor, the couture of the genre, so mundane in all its trappings, as to skirt classification, operating in a borderland, a no-man’s-land, occupied by the likes of On the Beach, Lord of the Flies, maybe Daniel Petrie’s Resurrection, maybe Todd Haynes’s …
A chef (Ewan McGregor) and an epidemiologist (Eva Green) fall in love while the world around them gives way to a sensory-depriving epidemic. Be it zombies or infectious plagues, an assault on the immune system has long been a staple of horror and melodrama. Not since Todd Haynes’s Safe has …
Todd Haynes's personal baptism in the commercial mainstream. It starts out as if it could be an extension of one of the three plot strands in his 16mm black-and-white homoerotic undergrounder, Poison -- the science-fictional strand to do with a "Leper Sex Killer on the Loose." An AIDS metaphor, unmistakably. …
Todd Haynes's self-indulgent and overreaching excavation of the "glam" scene of the early Seventies. It starts out in mid-19th Century with the arrival on earth of Oscar Wilde, deposited on a Dublin doorstep by flying saucer. After a forward leap of a hundred years, it settles down (somewhat) to a …
Considering the amount of nonconforming nihilism and punk prophecy inextricably linked to the band, the last place one expected Todd Haynes’ (Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven) account to begin was with a clip from the unquestionably aboveground game show, I’ve Got a Secret. (Bandmate John Cales’ secret was his participation …
File this under “were it not for coincidence there’d be no story at all.” Two deaf children (Millicent Simmonds and Oakes Fegley), separated by five decades and both searching for the same thing, are flattened by a train of coincidence in this period(s) melodrama from director Todd Haynes (Far from …