Film
What's on at the cinema plus reviews of the latest movie and DVD releases
Bookmark this pageHair (1979)
Director: Milos Forman
Movie review
From Time Out Film Guide
Other than providing the full stop to his would-be '60s trilogy (previous episodes: Taking Off and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), it's difficult to determine what could have attracted Forman to a musical as hopelessly leaden as Hair and its uneasy amalgam of draft-card burning, cosmic consciousness, ill-judged comedy and dopey sentimentality. Sounding, and for the most part looking, like a National Lampoon parody of some ghastly Swinging Sixties compendium, it lacks even the vitality of the stage show (books/lyrics James Rado, Gerome Ragni), which was at least persuasively ingenuous. The problem with Hair is that it's neither old enough to have acquired the picturesque dignity of a period piece, nor young enough to have the slightest contemporary relevance. The result is a smug, banal fairytale-with-a-message, redeemed only by the intermittently imaginative staging of the songs.Author: AC
Cast & crew
Director: Milos Forman
Producer: Lester Persky, Michael Butler
Cast: John Savage, Treat Williams, Beverly D'Angelo, Annie Golden, Dorsey Wright, Don Dacus, Nicholas Ray, Twyla Tharp full cast
Genre(s): Musicals
Duration: 121 mins
Most popular on this site
Top Stories
Review: Penélope Cruz more raunchy than ever in 'Nine'
Dave Calhoun reports on Rob Marshall's Oscar-touted musical with Daniel Day-Lewis playing a troubled director
Time Out's 101 Films of the Decade
Ten years, thousands of movies and millions of dollars in international box office, and it all boils down to this
Jim Jarmusch on 'The Limits of Control'
Jim Jarmusch has followed ‘Broken Flowers’ with an esoteric crime mystery. Dave Calhoun speaks to him from his New York office
Richard Linklater on 'Me and Orson Welles'
Dave Calhoun meets the 49-year-old, Houston-born filmmaker Richard Linklater to discuss his new comedy
Our verdict on Peter Jackson's The Lovely Bones
Peter Jackson ends a triumphant decade with a sentimental misfire with this lush Alice Sebold adaptation
On the set of Ken Loach's 'Route Irish'
Dave Calhoun meets Ken Loach on the set of his forthcoming Iraq war movie
Is 'Paranormal Activity' the new 'Blair Witch'?
How does a film go from DIY experiment to box-office smash? 'Paranormal Activity' director Oren Peli explains
A gateway to all things 'New Moon'
In anticipation of 'The Twilight Saga: New Moon', Time Out is offering the chance to pick up a limited edition pack with three exclusive magazines and a free poster.
The films that deserve a TV spin-off
With Roland Emmerich suggesting he'd like to make a '2012' TV spin-off, we propose some more movie-to-TV serialisations
Time Out's 50 greatest animated films with commentary by Terry Gilliam
In celebration of the release of Pixar's 'Up' and Wes Anderson's 'Fantastic Mr Fox', read our rundown of fifty classic feature length animations
What do you think?
Post your review now