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Mirror, Mirror

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This article appeared in the September 28, 2023 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Read and listen to all of our coverage NYFF61 here. May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) One of my great pleasures in recent years has been watching Todd Haynes move gradually from pastiche and deconstruction (however gorgeously crafted) toward a more realistic and emotionally involving aesthetic, without sacrificing any of his intellectual edge. I never quite got the rhapsodic response to Far from Heaven (2002). Not that this postmodern Sirkian melodrama is without emotional payoff—the relationship between Julianne Moore’s ’50s housewife and Dennis Haysbert’s Black gardener is grounded in a yearning all the more powerful for being ambiguous and unconsummated. But was anyone ever quite as clueless and inarticulate as Moore’s Cathy? With that film’s sumptuous color scheme and the swooning Elmer Bernstein sc

Mirror, Mirror | Film Comment Festival Dispatch Mirror, Mirror Imitation of life: Todd Haynes’s latest, which opens this year's NYFF, rips a tale from the tabloid headlines and turns it into a modern melodrama of desire, deception, and delusion by Molly Haskell May December (Todd Haynes, 2023) One of my great pleasures in recent years has been watching Todd Haynes move gradually from pastiche and deconstruction (however gorgeously crafted) toward a more realistic and emotionally involving aesthetic, without sacrificing any of his intellectual edge. I never quite got the rhapsodic response to F

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