Blow Dry

Alan Rickman and Natasha Richardson head a great ensemble cast in a delightful comedy. As the National Hairdressing Championships descend on an English town, a prizewinning stylist (Rickman) reunites with his ex (Richardson) for a final shot at glory. Rachel Griffiths, Josh Hartnett, Rachael Leigh Cook, Bill Nighy, Warren Clarke., When the tiny town of Keighley lands the rights to host the annual British hairdressing championships, practically every city in the United Kingdom is represented in the competition – except Keighley itself. It seems the event is team-oriented, and the only suitable local contestants had a huge falling out a decade ago. For Brian, the son of two hairdressers, that falling out had personal consequences: His mother Shelley left his father Phil to take up with Phil’s hair model Sandra. Since then, former styling champ Phil has settled for training Brian to help run his lowly barber shop, while Shelley and Sandra have opened a salon of their own. But when Shelley learns that she has terminal cancer, she reaches out to her family in hopes that a reunion for the hairdressing contest might help them all find some sense of closure. To complicate matters, Phil’s old arch-nemesis, Ray, is now a two-time champ looking for a three-peat, and he’s brought along his beautiful American daughter Christina to work on his team., When the tiny town of Keighley lands the rights to host the annual British hairdressing championships, practically every town in the UK is represented – except Keighley itself., Keighley, West Yorkshire, is gearing up for its biggest week in years, the National Hairdressing Championships. Among the contenders are former champ Phil and his arch rival, shifty Ray. Fringe-clipping comedy with romance and dirty tricks., In this British comedy, a nationwide hairdressing competition invades the small town of Keighley, pitting two local beauty salons against the country’s most fabulous stylists. One shop is run by Phil (Alan Rickman), a staunch traditionalist in hairstyling who works alongside his son Brian (Josh Hartnett), who moonlights at a funeral parlor, coiffing the recently deceased. His free-spirited ex-wife Shelley (Natasha Richardson) left him to start a flashier salon of her own and has since become involved with her business partner Sandra (Rachel Griffiths). Phil and Shelley keep their distance from one another, and Phil would prefer to stay out of the contest altogether, but when several big-city beauty operators take an underhanded approach to the competition, Phil and Shelley reunite in order to prove that, in glamorous hairstyling, Keighley takes a back seat to no one. Adapted from a screenplay by Simon Beaufoy, who scripted The Full Monty, Blow Dry also stars Rachael Leigh Cook and Hugh Bonneville.