Buoyed by instinctive performances (especially the powerful Samantha Castillo as Junior’s mother Marta) and an unnerving score, "Bad Hair" may just be this year’s foreign sleeper hit.

| Sep 15, 2022

Some of the film's strongest images are of the massive tenements and the signs of life on the different balconies.

| Feb 12, 2021

Mariana Rondón...uses her knowledge and background from Barquisimeto, Venezuela to her advantage, beautifully capturing the setting and making the audience feel as if they are there, experiencing Latin America along with their family.

| Aug 14, 2019

An imperfect yet endearing portrait of the complex sentiment that met the end of Chávez's rule in Venezuela, this affectionately articulated adolescent drama manages to take a few caustic swipes at the society that surrounds it.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Apr 4, 2019

Venezuelan filmmaker Mariana Rondn deftly explores gender roles and how poverty can amplify the prejudices against defying them.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 15, 2017

Thought-provoking, troubling drama has explicit sex.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 16, 2016

In Mariana Rondon's heart-rending coming-of-age film, individuality stands little chance against the madding crowd of urban Venezuela.

| Original Score: B+ | Dec 30, 2015

There's a sense of being trapped that permeates "Bad Hair" - trapped in your own flesh, trapped in circumstances, trapped in the family you're born into.

| Original Score: B+ | Feb 27, 2015

Rondn has plenty of important and harsh things to say about social constructs, hypocrisy and maternal tough love.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 13, 2015

Rondn turns a deceptively simple coming-of-age tale into a vibrant treatise upon a raft of disparate issues ... with authenticity, integrity and, perhaps most impressively, a transcendent sense of levity.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 1, 2015

A heartbreaking child's-eye view of the moment when it begins to dawn that the world is going to be unimaginably cruel to a nonconformist.

| Jan 30, 2015

[An] engrossing portrait of life in Chavez's crumbling social experiment.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2015

The director Mariana Rondn elicits a moving and unaffected performance from Lange as the boy desperate to please his mother even as he realises how much his behaviour vexes her.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 29, 2015

Pelo Malo, which translates as "bad hair", takes a child's-eye view of growing up mixed race in the slums of Caracas, Venezuela.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2015

A quietly perceptive work that teases out insights without undue strain.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 29, 2015

An insightful examination of racism, homophobia and identity in Latin America.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2015

With two combustible lead performances and a vibrant representation of the high-rise life among Venezuela's working poor, Rondn leads an assured dance through universal themes of poverty, family and sexuality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 29, 2015

Writer-director Mariana Rondn offers a striking new twist on mother-son relationships.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 26, 2015

Notable for its insight and refreshing lack of sentimentality.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 26, 2015

The film is anchored by two riveting performances from Castillo and Lange, whose characters are searching for themselves and feeling increasingly desperate as they fail.

| Jan 22, 2015