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This is not just a gay film, nor a great film that just happens to be gay. As [B. Ruby] Rich writes, the "queer present negotiates with the past, knowing full well that the future is at stake". At the heart of Poison – alongside the other pioneering films of New Queer Cinema– is a conscious temporal attempt to confront the abusive history of queer as a category of shame, and to move it in a completely different direction. Haynes' film is therefore a significant entry in the history of cinema.

Haynes interweaves the three stories for poetic rather than thematic effect, imbuing the somewhat clinical compositions (the greatest weakness of all his film) with a rich, associative imagination. The director's Bowie-like ability to mimic various genres rarely seemed more purposeful than it does here: at its most direct, POISON evokes like few other films what it's like to never feel at home in one's own skin.

Comfort was what Haynes wanted to snatch away from us. In both form and subject, "Poison'' still feels defiant. It's the work of a young filmmaker who looked at the world around him, saw the American government's silence about the AIDS crisis and the void of visible gay people in the culture and came up with this charged allegory for that moment.

Poison is the exemplary work of New Queer Cinema (if not necessarily the best), because it so rigorously works through the political issues of its moment.

A milestone in American independent film and the inciting spark for what came to be known as the New Queer Cinema, Todd Haynes's first feature, "Poison" (1991), has always stood for much more than itself... For detractors and admirers alike "Poison" was a new kind of gay film, not a polite plea for tolerance but an upfront exploration of identity, reflecting the heady complications of queer theory and the confrontational urgency of AIDS activism.

Poison has revolution running through its blood, and the final image suggests "a child shall lead them." To what we may ask, but Haynes wisely leaves that as a question mark absorbed in a fade-to-white.

The disparate styles and the absence of clear links between the stories make for unusually provocative viewing, because their shared themes (deviancy, alienation, persecution, monstrousness) are merely implied through the cutting. Compelling and quirkily intelligent; Genet, one feels, would have been impressed.

It's a packed and largely purposeful 85-minute-film that intercuts three separate stories in a way that produces a good many potent, novel, and interesting effects. And as social protest, it's stronger than many other examples around. But the postmodernist traits it employs... can be read both as symptoms of the times we're living in and as critical commentaries about them.