The Plot: Two beauty salons in a small English town are locked in a heated rivalry over a national hairdressing competition. On one side is an old-fashioned hairdresser with his morgue beautician son. On the other side is his ex-wife who is now a lesbian.

Reviews: If a businessmans wife left him for a business associate, it would be just another banal break-up unless of course the associate proved to be another woman. But thats the least of the pandering by this British farce, which is based on Never Been Better, a pulled-from the archives script by Simon Beaufoy, the writer who became hot property after his pond-hopping smash The Full Monty.
The business in question is a friseur shop, and the grand event at the films epicenter is the British Hairdresser Championship, which for some reason is taking place in a small countryside enclave. Alan Rickman, full of forlorn, plays the cast-aside husband with dormant cutlery skills; Natasha Richardson is his cancer-stricken ex and Rachel Griffiths her overemotional lover. For crossover appeal (both generational and cultural) American heartthrobs Josh Hartnett and Rachel Leigh Cook who do a passable job with their British accents are in the mix as young loves with vocational desires to cut and color. But Blow Dry, ignoring its talented cast, hangs more on tedious melodrama than on hair-raising high jinks. Bill Nighy as the foppish grandmaster of the coif gives the film its intermittent kick; supermodel Heidi Klum, sporting a teased and dyed