All posts tagged: Todd Haynes

From the Archives: UnSafe at Any Distance

After its screening at the Sundance film festival in January 1995 and its release later that summer, Todd Haynes’ Safe elicited much commentary by critics and film scholars on the film’s cinematographic techniques (few close-ups, many long takes) that distance spectators from the plight of the protagonist, Carol White, as she struggles with the increasingly horrifying symptoms of environmental illness, and thus render difficult, if not altogether impossible, sympathetic identification with her. 

Todd Haynes’s “Poison” Reconsidered

Poison tells three tales about ostracism. In “Horror,” an experimental serum turns an overzealous scientist into a plague-carrier; this storyline is filmed in the style of trashy “psychotronic” B-movies such as Glen or Glenda and Carnival of Souls with a touch also of Samuel Fuller…

The End

I’m Not There (Todd Haynes, 2007) is an entrancing movie. Cate Blanchett is a fine actor. As one of the six Dylans—“Jude Quinn,” the star at his shimmering, recalcitrant zenith—Blanchett hazards a daring performance, peaking in the Fellini-dreaming encounter with David Cross’s Allen Ginsberg.