Far from Heaven

Boston Globe Wesley Morris

This is a love letter from one auteur to another that doesn't feel like a term paper. Instead, Far From Heaven is an honest-to-God drama with resonance all its own.

Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir

A movie for hardcore film geeks and regular folk alike, a stunning, and stunningly improbable, fusion of postmodern pastiche and old-school Hollywood melodrama. It's both a marvelous technical accomplishment and a tragic love story that sweeps you off your feet.

Entertainment Weekly Owen Gleiberman

Bold and brilliant.

Christian Science Monitor David Sterritt

Easily the best American film so far this year, Far From Heaven is close to perfect.

Chicago Tribune Michael Wilmington

There's an incongruous but ravishing beauty in Far From Heaven, and in its three excellent central performances, that counteracts the seeming kitschiness of the story.

Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert

Julianne Moore, Dennis Quaid and Dennis Haysbert are called on to play characters whose instincts are wholly different from their own. By succeeding, they make their characters real, instead of stereotypes.

The New York Times Dana Stevens

It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.

New York Post Lou Lumenick

Perhaps the year's most daring and fully realized movie, is a pitch-perfect re-creation of '50s melodramas, showcasing a four-hankie performance by a peroxided Julianne Moore.

Philadelphia Inquirer Steven Rea

The movie is, start to finish, candy-colored angst.

Los Angeles Times Manohla Dargis

The film's three leads are extraordinary, but what Moore does with her role is so beyond the parameters of what we call great acting that it nearly defies categorization.

Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum

This brilliantly and comprehensively captures the look, feel, and sound of glamorous 50s tearjerkers like All That Heaven Allows, not to mock or feel superior to them but to say new things with their vocabulary.

Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy

Far From Heaven would have been one of the great American films of the '50s; it is certainly the finest American melodrama of our time.

The Onion (A.V. Club) Keith Phipps

Haynes makes it possible to forget all the layers at work and simply be swept up in the story's emotions. As in Sirk's films, these characters live and breathe within the film's exaggerated reality, thanks to rich performances by Haysbert, Quaid, and especially Moore.

Newsweek David Ansen

Moore’s stunning, subtle performance as a woman trapped in the conventions of her time encapsulates the film’s brave, double-edged beauty.

Variety David Rooney

An accomplished marriage of elaborate style and content.

Time Richard Schickel

Ironizes without parodying an antique screen manner, then reaches out from beneath this smooth cover to grab us.

Washington Post Desson Thomson

Three sterling performances from Moore, Haysbert and Quaid, all of whom grapple with psychic pain in different, touching ways.

Village Voice J. Hoberman

A supremely intelligent pastiche.

LA Weekly Ella Taylor

Not a campy movie. True, it has its ironies, but though you can read it ironically if you wish, Haynes' triumph is that it also plays beautifully straight.

Austin Chronicle Marjorie Baumgarten

Haynes brings the emotional underbelly to the surface, he also tricks up the visual surface with elaborate color schemes that provide unspoken clues regarding the characters’ frames of mind.

New York Daily News Jack Mathews

May be the year's most derivative film, but it's also the most original.

Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez

It feels wholly artificial, and your eyes never tire of drinking it all in.

ReelViews James Berardinelli

Begins almost as a nostalgic excursion, but quickly detours into a powerful and telling story that examines forbidden love, racial tension, and other issues that are as valid today as they were in the 1950s.

New York Magazine Peter Rainer

It elevates female sacrifice into an aesthetic. The movie isn't about suffering, really. It's about how you look when you suffer, how you dress up for it. Style is all.

The New Yorker Anthony Lane

In short, Haynes is so smart, tolerant, and thoughtful that he has to be saved by his actors. Julianne Moore takes this picture further, perhaps, than anyone can have dreamed. [18 November 2002, p. 104]

TV Guide Ken Fox

Haynes took an enormous risk here, but thanks to his thoughtful script and an utterly sincere performance from Moore, what could have easily become a cold, calculated exercise in postmodern pastiche winds up a powerful and deeply moving example of melodramatic moviemaking.

USA Today Mike Clark

Glossy or not, the movie is unflinchingly tough-minded, down to its Hollywood-weepy ending, which, if you think about it, may be the year's gloomiest.

San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle

If it's ultimately a failure -- and I think it is -- it's still worth seeing, because it's the most ambitious and magnificent failure in recent memory. That, in a sense, qualifies it as a certain kind of "good movie."

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey

For all its accomplishments, Far from Heaven remains hermetic, an elegant exercise in deadpan irony. What does the movie ultimately mean? Art, we're told, should not mean, but be -- but Haynes's cinematic essays are designed to provoke commentary.

Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman

A handsome tribute to an era as quaintly distant as tail-fin Chevrolets and A-bomb scares.

Film Threat Tim Merrill

Once again, though -- almost in spite of Haynes' rigorous post-ironic efforts to bring Sirk back from the dead in any and every way he can -- it ultimately comes down to Moore -- and Moore is simply...wonderful.

Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern

Yet dramatic energy is in short supply. 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.

Dallas Observer Jean Oppenheimer

When all is said and done, Far from Heaven proves an easier film to appreciate than to emotionally embrace. It fails the test of being, in the descriptive phrase of Pauline Kael, "compulsively watchable."

Seattle Post-Intelligencer William Arnold

It's a daring failure that should delight many devotees of Classic Hollywood.

The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann

Even with its latter-day (modified) frankness, Far From Heaven is only thin glamour that lacks a tacit wry base. Thus diminished, it can be tagged with a term that Susan Sontag once defined so well that she put it out of circulation: camp.

Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow

It's the oddest case yet of the Emperor's New Clothes. After all, the Emperor in the fairy tale was naked. This movie has tons of fabulous clothing. The people disappear within their wardrobes.

Washington Post Stephen Hunter

The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde.