Metrograph

An homage to the Eisenhower era melodramas of Douglas Sirk that reworks the basic materials of his 1955 All That Heaven Allows to explicitly explore dynamics of sexual and social transgression verboten in the Hollywood of Sirk’s time, Haynes’s sumptuous film—featuring a period-appropriate score by Elmer Bernstein and a remarkable approximation of Technicolor saturation by cinematographer Ed Lachman—stars Julianne Moore and Dennis Quaid as a well-heeled Connecticut couple whose seemingly perfect suburban existence is upended when he’s discovered trawling Hartford’s gay bars and she strikes up an affair with her new Black gardener, played with compassionate gravity by Dennis Haysbert.