Popular reviews

• 

  Review by Hari Nef 46

  don’t @ me but todd haynes made a film about a straight white cisgender woman that illustrates Queer experience more incisively and viscerally than the vast majority of contemporary films showcasing queer (identified) characters and that’s the power of cinema baby

• 

  Review by Kat ★★★★½ 29

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  There’s something wrong with Carol White - it’s a sneeze in the opening scene of the film, it’s the couch she meticulously picked out to match her house that comes in the wrong colour, it’s the way she doesn’t laugh at a sexist joke told over dinner - all these small ways she unwittingly disturbs the peace of her homemaker life. This wrongness is pervasive, and takes effect on her body, as if without her consent it begins to reject the manifestations of her suppression - after she gets a perm, her nose starts to bleed. Her husband embraces her, and she vomits.

  Socially anaesthetised, all she can remember of a childhood room is the yellow wallpaper - this reference…

• 

  Review by Peter Labuza ★★★★½ 7

  There's enough films about suburban ennui and cult like dependence that one might worry that Safe has the worry of losing its edge these days, but Haynes's details, perception, and god damn craft more or less trumps any of those individual films off the top of my head. Let's get the couple of questionable moments out of the way: I don't like Haynes in a comic mode. Safe works because his perceptions and intuition come from a very different mode of filmmaking, so when you get an obvious satire scene like the stepson reading his paper about LA violence or even the bit with the black couch, I can't help feel like he's hitting broad targets (leave that to Solondz,…

• 

  Review by K. Austin Collins

  I'm just a total milkaholic, actually. I mean, before the fruit thing.

• 

  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★

  Trading in one prison for another. The body rebels.

• 

  Review by cameron fetter ★★★★★ 4

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  part of what makes Safe work so well is its ambiguity. is it about a gullible woman being preyed on by a cult, is it about the danger of 'self help culture'? or is it about the mishandling of the aids crisis, or maybe freeing oneself from suburban hell?
  what cuts through the ambiguity like a cruel psychic knife, though, is the deep sense of unease and isolation the film instills. carol looks like a forlorn barbie doll in the vast and all-consuming wide shots of huge, decadent houses and smog-choked los angeles roadways. slow zooms push into scenes of mundanity as if they were horror movie cornucopias of gore, the harrowing soundtrack pulsating and swelling all the while, guiding…

• 

  Review by Lucy ★★★ 5

  julianne moore, queen of anxiety

• 

  Review by Brett Wright ★★★★★ 10

  There is an interview with Guy Maddin on the ‘My Winnipeg’ Criterion disc in which he compares melodrama to Werner Herzog's ecstatic truths. Maddin defines melodrama as "life uninhibited,” a style where characters can turn their insides out by articulating their deepest emotions in their fullest and most expressive forms. In ‘Safe,’ Haynes does something unique with melodrama, because he treats the film’s most ecstatic moments like they are being yelled through gritted teeth. There is a disharmony between the interior and exterior of his lead character Carol White. She has scenes of extremely heightened emotion in the film, but they are depicted more as desperate urgings to be emotive by her body rather than expressions of deep inner emotions…

• 

  Review by laird ★★★★★ 1

  Sick of it all. Even the camera keeps its distance as we watch the ant-farm proceedings. Except for that final, crushing close-up. Alone, with nowhere left to go but in: the self-help trap.

• 

  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 8

  85/100

  Right from the opening shot of a softly-lit neighborhood in the dead of night, viewed from the hood of a weirdly eerie car, Safe forced me to look closer and stare, no matter how strangely paralyzed and uncomfortable I would feel as a result. Directed by Todd Haynes, the film oozes an uneasy and restless mood of paranoia and genuine commentary, practically fighting off the glances and the sickness until there's no other choice but to be completely enraptured by the film's sunny horror.

  Julianne Moore gives a knockout of a performance, but unlike her recent role in Still Alice, she is backed by a stellar directorial effort by Haynes. His focused and detached viewpoint of hopelessly emotional events give Safe a shocking sense of weight and significance that could've been lacking if crafted by lesser hands. A brilliant film from start to finish.

• 

  Review by Laura ★★★★

  confessions of a milkaholic

• 

  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★ 4

  A bored housewife develops a host of inexplicable sympathetic ailments all to avoid having sex with her husband. Sad!

  This makes a good bookend with Todd Haynes’ most recent film “Dark Waters”, which is about how Julianne Moore’s character in this movie was 100% right and definitely was being poisoned by the modern world and all its chemicals. Everyone get in the containment sphere and say “I love you” into a mirror!