If the scenario sounds political, director Valery Todorovsky (The Land of the Deaf) elevates fashion, dance moves, and romantic entanglements over any larger statements about the Soviet regime.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 23, 2024

What is... wondrous, the chief repression that we see-and hear-is Stalinist hatred of jazz and American hip clothes.

| Jun 19, 2013

Imagine Baz Luhrmann on borscht.

| Oct 31, 2012

I really wanted to enjoy this cause I really liked what the movie was going for and the numbers are often fun. But there were too many things that bothered me to enjoy it.

| Original Score: 2/4 | May 12, 2012

You could get whiplash trying to keep up with everything, but I suspect that's what hyperactive director Valeriy Todorovskiy is going for...

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | May 3, 2012

It's taken the Russian musical "Hipsters" four years to reach America. That's all right. It may take audiences four years to recover.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 12, 2012

Hipsters gets rubles for trying, but what's on screen is thin and obvious, the characters one-dimensional, the musical numbers and satire vapid.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 10, 2012

A candy-colored confection with a dark, bittersweet center.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 6, 2012

The birth of the cool in the USSR forged into a rocking Soviet Graffitti that will heat the world.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Mar 17, 2012

Or as Yakov Smirnoff would say: in Soviet Russia, party finds you!

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Feb 24, 2012

It's an intriguing spectacle, but there's no substance behind it.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 24, 2012

Are you ready for a bright and breezy musical comedy from Russia?

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 24, 2012

An endearing curiosity that, at 125 minutes, is as badly in need of a trim as the hair of its comically coiffed dandies.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 23, 2012

The hipster moment may have faded fast through repression and attrition, but in Todorovsky's reading, it was crucially formative on today's Russian youth.

| Feb 23, 2012

Light as a bubble, Hipsters suggests that age may catch up with everyone, but that there will always be people fighting against the current of conformity, even if they only express it via how they wear their hair.

| Original Score: B | Feb 23, 2012

While everything looks glinty and gorgeous, the story's political edge is dulled by excessive levity.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 21, 2012

Lightweight but watchable musical confection.

| Jan 13, 2012

Aside from what we get in the big dance scene, the songs are of little interest, and each one feels like an intrusion.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 12, 2012

Todorovsky cleverly indicates how every generation holds bragging rights to its own unique brand of youthful defiance.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 1, 2011

Like the excellent recent documentary My Perestroika, this film is suffused with an uneasy nostalgia for the Communist heyday: simpler, more innocent, yet somehow wilder, with more at stake.

| Original Score: B | Oct 28, 2011