75
The narrative works through the many contradictions brewing inside its main character in the wake of his personal actualization without ever feeling like a dramatic checklist.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
70
The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney
A spare neorealist drama that holds attention and emotional involvement with its deft balance of toughness and sensitivity.
63
New York Post by Farran Smith Nehme
Played with enormous charm by Samuel Lange Zambrano, Junior is a handsome kid.
80
While Rondon’s focus is the struggle of wills between a boy awakening to homosexual feelings and his embittered mother, the helmer invests their collision with a powerful specificity.
67
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Bad Hair can best be described as expertly depressing—a subcategory of art cinema that seems worth the punishment only when the gloom is counterbalanced by at least a few transcendent moments. No such moments ever surface here, however, apart from a brief fantasy during the closing credits.
42
The Playlist by Nikola Grozdanovic
With her underdeveloped, dismissive, screenplay and myopic direction, Rondòn is as delicate with her theme as Michael Bay is with his American flag shots or Tim Burton with his kitschy quirkiness. That hers is a serious context makes it that much more disappointing.
70
Rondón treats her characters with toughness and empathy, without devising easy outs or slipping into sentimentality.
75
RogerEbert.com by Sheila O'Malley
Populated with totally naturalistic performances, and a stunningly observed relationship between mother and son (their scenes together are phenomenal), Bad Hair works by keeping its focus on the small details of everyday life and its rhythms.
70
Village Voice by Stephanie Zacharek
There’s plenty of prickly tenderness, for both mother and son, at the heart of Bad Hair. All children yearn for things beyond their reach, and if they’re honest about it, adults do too. It’s a feeling you never outgrow.
90
The New York Times by Stephen Holden
Bad Hair is an uncomfortably accurate depiction of a poignant mother-son power struggle in a fatherless family in which each knows how to get under the other’s skin.