Todd Haynes' Far from Heaven, which "plunged into the subtext of those old movies", whereas Down with Love, being an "updating and a critique", "snips that subtext away", making it "less sophisticated than what it imitates". Conversely, The San Francisco Chronicle Mick LaSalle wrote "Down With Love is superior to Far From Heaven", which "seems naive in comparison" because "Down with Love is a very smart, very shrewd movie, and the smartest, shrewdest thing about it is the way it masquerades as just a fluffy comedy, a diversion, a trifle. Hardly a trifle, Down With Love distills 40 years of sexual politics into 100 minutes, using the romantic-comedy conventions of an earlier time to comment on the governing social assumptions of yesterday—and today, as well... The brilliance of Down With Love is that it slyly reminds us that our modern perspective, like every 'modern perspective' that preceded it, is doomed to obsolescence and isn't some final stage of enlightened social thought." Opposing opinions even occurred at the same newspaper, as was the case with The New York Observer, where Rex Reed's review was headlined "Down With Down With Love!" but Andrew Sarris's headline countered with "It's Affectionate and Smart, And I'm Down With Love". Richard Corliss of Time admired Orlandi's costumes and Laws' design for their "giddily precise exaggeration" and wrote that the script "has a gentle heart to humanize its sharp sitcom wit," advising his readers to "stay for the movie's denouement: a two-minute speech that wraps up the plot like Christmas ribbons around a time bomb". But he found the film to be "miscast at the top" and "conflicted about its subject—it both derides and adores what it means to parody" and that director "Reed often uses a gong where chimes would do." Corliss concludes: "As you see, we too are conflicted about this film. We want to love it, but like a Rock Hudson rake, we keep finding fault in its allure. We want to hate it, but like Doris Day, we finally can't say no". Nathan Rabin wrote that Chicago critics by and large embraced Down With Love, noting: "It got two thumbs up from Ebert & Roeper and was No. 2 on the Top 10 list of Chicago Reader critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who called it a "masterpiece" and wrote "If a more interesting and entertaining Hollywood movie than Down with Love has come along this