This week’s podcast features a conversation with Todd Haynes, whose new film, Carol, opens this weekend. During the 53rd New York Film Festival, where Carol played in the Main Slate, Haynes sat down with festival director Kent Jones for one of our free HBO Directors Dialogues. Subscribe to The Close-Up on iTunes to hear more insightful conversations like this one, and, if you like what you hear, leave us a review! It helps us reach more cinephiles like you all around the world. 

Timed to Carol‘s theatrical release, we’re presenting a comprehensive retrospective of Haynes’s vivid and subversive body of cinema. In addition to his own work, the director has chosen a slate of films that have influenced him, from Douglas Sirk’s classic melodrama Imitation of Life to Nicolas Roeg’s hallucinatory glam film, Performance.

Carol stars Cate Blanchett as a married socialite in 1950s Manhattan who embarks on an affair with the much younger Therese, played by Rooney Mara. The film was a smash hit at Cannes, where it competed for the Palme d’Or and Mara won the Best Actress Award for her understated performance. It was also an audience and critical favorite at NYFF, where Scout Tafoya wrote for rogerebert.com, “I fell head over heels in love with Carol,” and Time Out New York raved, “forget the Oscars, Carol might just be the best film of the decade.”

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