Rating: 
Summary: if only there were a zero star
Review: A promising cast had me hyped about this movie however it is about 2 hours of your life that you will never get back no matter how hard you try. In addition it took days to completely recover from the ickiness that this movie caused me. 30 minutes into it I was wondering where the heck this film was going and when I realized, it was too late to turn back. Don't say I didn't give you fair warning. Run as far and as fast away from this film as possible!
Rating: 
Summary: Superb
Review: This film is a masterpeice everything about it is perfection , Julianne Moore was robbed of best actress at the Oscars. The whole film is totally wonderful. I love it.
Rating:
Summary: Black Comedy or Serious Movie????
Review: Studio publicity and reviews guide this movie to a melodrama in the Douglas Sirk tradition. The plot follows the seasons (beginning with the Fall) when a housewife's perfect 1950's life slowly unravels. The acting is superb and the film is breathtaking in color and framing. However there seems to be something else here...When the movie opens we see the housewife played by Julianne Moore talking with her son. The dialogue is crisp. Almost to a point of distraction. Then we notice her dress - an exaggeration of the 1950's? The father played by Dennis Quaid suffers from the same staid dialogue which makes you wonder more. So the question popped into my head is this a melodrama or clever black comedy? I wonder now if this wasn't meant to be black comedy that was grossly misinterpreted by target audiences and then twist marketed by the studio. The movie can be appreciated from either view point and deserves your attention.
Rating:
Summary: 0 Stars Anyone?
Review: This had to be one of, if not the worst movies I have ever seen. And I've seen A LOT. I kept waiting for the story to get going, and it never does. It takes the life of a 1950's woman and pins her with all of our glorious modern problems. I don't think anything like this ever happened, one at a time maybe, but racial conflict, homosexuality, social gossip, abuse, alcoholism, etc, etc, etc all at once? And suprisingly, she handled all too well. Oh, and I would never let a 13-year old watch this. It needed a rating of R. Not to mention, where was the ending of this film? Just has it FINALLY gets around to loading her life with every problem imaginable, the movie simply stopped. I think that it was WAY beneath any actors dignity to do this, but especially Dennis Quaid whom I used to like. Over all this movie was overdramatic, slow, boring, un-entertaining, unrealistic and just plain bad. Save your money for something else, and you won't regret it.
Rating:
Summary: Not for everyone
Review: I watched this movie on a plane. I can't tell you how many people complained on the flight and wanted their headset money back. It was rated PG-13? This is not a kids movie. If my kids were with me, I would have been very upset. I love Dennis Quaid, as an actor, and I couldn't stand him in this film. He really wasn't the best person to play that role. The plot was too much to handle all at once, homosexuality, racial tensions, and spouse abuse, alcoholic. Not to mention how neglected the children were in this film. I'm sure the plot is very believable, and this really could have happened...but the story just lost something along the way...:-(
Rating:
Summary: Easily one of the best movies of 2002.
Review: Far from Heaven (Todd Haynes, 2002) The movies that have found their way onto my Best of 2002 list have no way of being compared, really. It's impossible to take, for example, The Ring, Rabbit-Proof Fence, and Far from Heaven and compare them in any meaningful way. Ranking these ten is going to be the toughest of jobs. Seeing this movie made it that much more difficult, because in many years, Far from Heaven would have topped the list without a second thought. Far from Heaven is Todd Haynes' homage to the weepies of the 1950s, and anyone who's seen Imitation of Life or any of its cohorts will find a good deal of familiarity in here. The central characters are the Whitakers, Cathy (Julianne Moore), Frank (Dennis Quaid), and their children. Cathy and Frank are considered by the residents of their Connecticut suburb to be the perfect couple, so much so that the local weekly paper wants to do a profile on them. All the usual trappings of a film'the acting, the cinematography, the pace, etc.'succeed, so there's no use spending time on them here. What makes Far from Heaven stand out from the pack is the way Haynes conveys the attitudes of both fifties film and fifties life as counterpoints, and injects twenty-first century pacing into them. The first half-hour of the movie is spent setting up the family secrets, but instead of the leisurely pace one would expect from a Douglas Sirk film, Haynes sets us on edge from the get go with foreshadowing. We are never allowed to be lulled into that fifties sense of security that coddles, and seems to overwhelm, the characters. It's as if Haynes is sitting in the seat next to us chuckling at the naïveté of his characters. The aforementioned counterpoint is best shown by the treatments of the two taboos the characters break. (These aren't spoilers; if you've seen trailers for the film, you know all this already.) Frank is a closet homosexual who, by lucky coincidence, is drawn into the gay underground. When Cathy finds out, she ends up confiding in the family's new gardener, Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), who took over the family gardening business after the death of his father. Cathy soon finds out there is a lot more to Raymond than meets the eye, and the two find themselves falling in love. While one would expect the double standard one actually gets here (Frank's behavior is suspected, but not known, and somewhat tolerated; Cathy's causes the destruction of the fragile veneer not only in the family, but in the whole town), the subtle brilliance of the thing is in Haynes' treatment of the intertwining love stories. Cathy and Raymond get the Sirkian swelling violins, the long glances, the panoramic shots. Everything about the movie conveys, subtly, that Cathy and Raymond are right and the rest of the world is wrong. Frank's affairs, on the other hand, are filmed furtively, in half-light and hurried cut-scenes. His attempts at being 'cured' (after Cathy discovers his secret) are used in the film for humor value more than anything else. The effect becomes almost savage, and is a chilling underlining of the idea that while interracial relationships could be looked upon with sympathy in Hollywood back in the day, homosexuality was not to be tolerated. It is a deeply distressing undertone in the movie, and a dead accurate one. Far from Heaven is a nostalgia trip on crack, what Nick at Nite might be if framed by Martin Scorsese remakes of the original shows. It is never less than compelling, brilliant from beginning to end, and easily one of the best films of 2002. **** ½
Rating:
Summary: A movie everyone should see
Review: I just think this is a film that everyone should see. These kinds of social injustices during the 50's is finally being brought into the light. This film opens young people's eyes, like myself, to what social pressures that these people, who did nothing wrong, had to go through. A woman finds herself attracted to a good-looking man, whose skin happens to be a few shades darker; and a devoted husband who is only being true to himself, is rejected from society. Again, I think everyone should see this. We see how love between different types of people is not a choice and how important it is that everyone be accepting and open-minded of people who are different from ourselves. We can also see how boring the world would be if everyone looked the same, thought the same, dressed the same, etc. If that case, we might as well all be wearing uniforms.
Rating:
Summary: Fingernails grating on a chalkboard!
Review: "Far from Heaven" manages to touch all the cultural cliches ever imagined by every dysfunctional guilt ridden child of the last bedwettingly liberal half century. If one is looking for a story whose bitter self hatred puts the classic "Days of Wine and Roses" to shame and actors whose cartoonish melodrama is reminiscent of the worst Film-Noire (shot in shades of orange instead of gray and black) this movie is for you. Only one line lightens the dreary plodding. This is when, in the midst of the solidly Yankee, solidly bourgeois, solidly liberal town, a man with a sterotyped Mississipian accent shouts forth racial epithets. This line so perfectly caricatures the prejudices of the directors that it leaves the viewer ready to laugh out loud were they not otherwise anesthetised. ......
Rating: 
Summary: Far From Heaven is Sad, Not Bad
Review: Far from Heaven is not a bad movie--it's a sad movie, one that wears its sorrow with lush photography rather than its characters' situations, and therein lies its flaw. Instead of complementing the plot with its autumn Connecticut landscape that brings to mind all those lonely Sundays of the soul, the cinematography conveys mood but also supplants what could have been an involving and moving story. A wife in 1950s New England finds herself in turmoil at the realization her husband is gay. Both husband and wife find their emotions form a kind of smog around them, crowding out all other reality and values. This movie has been unfairly maligned as a politically correct Hollywood product because it sympathizes with the husband as well as his wife, who finds comfort in an African-American employee at their house after learning about her husband. But politics is not the point of this movie. Instead, the characters find themselves gradually swept into an out-of-control situation whose current move them from safety to the chaos of revealed secrets, shattered expectations and a deep sense of loss as their sense of security dissipates. The movie's fault lies not its subject but rather in the coldness one is left with by watching it, as if in blocking out their shame and unhappiness, the characters at the same time push away the audience rather than draw the viewer into their intimacies. However, overall the film is worth seeing for its look at superficially ordered lives torn apart by emotions that cut to the center of one's being.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, compelling and not quite what you think
Review: It may be quite slow at times but the movie is beautiful to watch. The story is wonderful with a very powerful message. And the acting, by all involved, is of the highest caliber.
It may have gay issues, but it is not a gay movie. It is a movie for everyone, one that everyone will be able to relate to on some level.
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