Todd Haynes

Known for making provocative movies that undercut standard genre tropes, writer-director Todd Haynes became associated with the so-called New Queer Cinema movement of the early 1990s, as coined by Sight & Sound critic B. Ruby Rich. He burst onto the scene with the cult classic short film "Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story" (1987), which used Barbie dolls to portray the main characters, and which was banned from being seen in public after the pop star's brother, Richard Carpenter, filed a successful lawsuit. He earned further attention with his first feature length film, "Poison" (1990), a gay-themed film funded by the National Endowment of the Arts. But it was his ambitious "Velvet Goldmine" (1998) that announced Haynes as a filmmaker to watch, thanks to that film's "Citizen Kane"-like search for a missing glam rock star. From there, Haynes used the 1950s domestic melodrama to depict repressed sexuality, suburban ennui and forbidden love amidst racial prejudice in "Far From Heaven" (2002), arguably one of his most realized and accessible pictures of his career. He next returned to his experimental roots with "I'm Not There" (2007), an unusual biopic that used six different actors - including one African-American and one female - to depict various aspects of Bob Dylan. There was no doubt that Haynes remained one of cinema's most challenging inventors.