Far From Heaven is another good example of a recent queer film that garnered critical acclaim and wider distribution. Written, directed, and produced by New Queer filmmakers Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon, Far From Heaven earned four Oscar nominations (Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Score, and Lead Actress Julianne Moore) and was distributed by Universal’s “independent” subsidiary Focus Features. As with the best of Todd Haynes’s films, Far From Heaven is a comment on cinematic style as much as it is a queer exploration of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Stylistically, the film is a meticulous recreation of a 1950s Hollywood melodrama that pointedly deals with issues a 1950s melodrama could never acknowledge under the dictates of the Production Code: interracial heterosexual romance and repressed male homosexuality. By foregrounding the formal conventions of the classical Hollywood woman’s film , Far From Heaven asks its viewers to think about how past and current film genres shape our ways of thinking about race, class, gender, and sexuality. Similarly, The Hours was another queer take on the melodrama that was honored with nine Oscar nominations (and one win, for Nicole Kidman’s Best Actress turn as Virginia Woolf). A Miramax-Paramount co-production, and based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer prizewinning novel of the same name, The Hours is structured a bit like Todd Haynes’s seminal New Queer film Poison : it intercuts three different but thematically related stories, each focusing on a single day in the life of three different women living in different times and places. What emerges is a historicized look at the possible lives and relationships that white middle-class women across 100 years of Western history have had available to them.