Opens Fri Nov 15 at various theaters.

The last time director Todd Haynes joined forces with actress Julianne Moore, the result was Safe, 1995's quiet, terrifying biological drama some championed as a brilliant allegorical study of AIDS, but which worked quite well as a non-allegorical study of "environmental illness," with Moore's pristine California housewife ravaged by an invisible, all-pervasive enemy her peers and loved ones were unable to acknowledge, much less understand.

Now there's Far from Heaven, in which Haynes again casts Moore as a pristine housewife battling invisible forces that threaten to destroy life as she knows it. But this time, the setting and the enemy are one and the same: Hartford, Connecticut, in the mid 1950s.

Moore stars as Cathy Whitaker, a happy homemaker blessed with a successful husband, two beautiful children, and the admiration of her peers. (After witnessing Mrs. Whitaker's respectful dealings with her gardener, a writer for a society newsletter praises her "kindness to coloreds.") But soon enough, forces both within and without Moore's heroine will tear her world apart.

In both style and substance, Far from Heaven pays homage to Douglas Sirk's classic 1956 melodrama All That Heaven Allows, which found Jane Wyman irking her peers and children by falling for a free-spirited Rock Hudson. In Sirk's film, true love was threatened by social snobbery and garden-variety ageism--Hudson's character is 10 years younger than Wyman's, with an outdoorsy bent that offends her society peers.

In Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes ups the ante by introducing intricate new threats to his heroine's true love--threats that would've landed Sirk's film in the studio censor's blender. But Haynes' pitch-perfect inclusion of sexual confusion and racial bigotry into Sirk's original mix gives him the power to transcend his source material and create a melodramatic masterpiece all his own.

A good amount of credit for Heaven's success must go to Julianne Moore, who follows up her immaculate performance in Safe with another stylized tour de force. Moore's spot-on mimicry of the happy '50s housewife may have us giggling at first, but soon we're swept completely into Cathy's world; Moore may be America's most beautiful Great Actress.

Elmer Bernstein's Sirk-inspired score, plus masterful supporting turns by Dennis Haysbert (known to TV audiences as "the President of the United States on 24") and especially Dennis Quaid, are simply icing on the cake. With Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes pulls off a brilliant cinematic trick, and reveals himself to be America's most emotionally intelligent filmmaker.