"The movie has the sense of being embalmed, or pickled. With its stilted dialogue not quite kitschy enough to be funny and not quite authentic enough to be realistic, the whole movie feels as if it's taking place in formaldehyde. I'm certain that was Haynes's point, but somehow you're exiled by his ironic distance, his formalities, his sense of study.

And it's somehow more Fifties than the Fifties themselves were. That's because in the Fifties, of course, no one knew it was the Fifties. It wasn't anything. It just was. Moreover, it was never so pure as this; rather, the shabby, messy struggle that was reality then (as now) was clotted with memory and residue: old cars, old houses, old furniture, old clothes, old human beings. Reality was a reliquary of yesteryear, not a display of perfect research. So this movie has the ambiance of the museum to it, or a theme-park re-creation. It's achingly self-conscious and clumsy, something Sirk never was."

"...it's less a visionary masterpiece than a crackpot Looney Tune, pretentious, abysmally slow, amateurishly acted....

The movie is an annoyance wrapped inside of an enigma as constructed by a cosmic ego that had been praised so much he believed it."