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"Barbie," director and co-writer Greta Gerwig ’s summer splash, is a dazzling achievement, both technically and in tone. It’s a visual feast that succeeds as both a gleeful escape and a battle cry. So crammed with impeccable attention to detail is "Barbie” that you couldn’t possibly catch it all in a single sitting; you’d have to devote an entire viewing just to the accessories, for example. The costume design (led by two-time Oscar winner Jacqueline Durran ) and production design (led by six-time Oscar nominee Sarah Greenwood ) are constantly clever and colorful, befitting the ever-evolving icon, and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto (a three-time Oscar nominee) gives everything a glossy gleam. It’s not just that Gerwig & Co. have recreated a bunch of Barbies from throughout her decades-long history, outfitted them with a variety of clothing and hairstyles, and placed them in pristine dream houses. It’s that they’ve brought these figures to life with infectious energy and a knowing wink.

“Barbie” can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout. They come from the insularity of an idyllic, pink-hued realm and the physical comedy of fish-out-of-water moments and choice pop culture references as the outside world increasingly encroaches. But because the marketing campaign has been so clever and so ubiquitous, you may discover that you’ve already seen a fair amount of the movie’s inspired moments, such as the “ 2001: A Space Odyssey ” homage and Ken’s self-pitying ‘80s power ballad. Such is the anticipation industrial complex.

And so you probably already know the basic plot: Barbie ( Margot Robbie ), the most popular of all the Barbies in Barbieland, begins experiencing an existential crisis. She must travel to the human world in order to understand herself and discover her true purpose. Her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), comes along for the ride because his own existence depends on Barbie acknowledging him. Both discover harsh truths—and make new friends –along the road to enlightenment. This bleeding of stark reality into an obsessively engineered fantasy calls to mind the revelations of “ The Truman Show ” and “The LEGO Movie,” but through a wry prism that’s specifically Gerwig’s.

This is a movie that acknowledges Barbie’s unrealistic physical proportions—and the kinds of very real body issues they can cause in young girls—while also celebrating her role as a feminist icon. After all, there was an astronaut Barbie doll (1965) before there was an actual woman in NASA’s astronaut corps (1978), an achievement “Barbie” commemorates by showing two suited-up women high-fiving each other among the stars, with Robbie’s Earth-bound Barbie saluting them with a sunny, “Yay, space!” This is also a movie in which Mattel (the doll’s manufacturer) and Warner Bros. (the film’s distributor) at least create the appearance that they’re in on the surprisingly pointed jokes at their expense. Mattel headquarters features a spacious, top-floor conference room populated solely by men with a heart-shaped, “ Dr. Strangelove ”-inspired lamp hovering over the table, yet Will Ferrell ’s CEO insists his company’s “gender-neutral bathrooms up the wazoo” are evidence of diversity. It's a neat trick.

As the film's star, Margot Robbie finds just the right balance between satire and sincerity. She’s  the  perfect casting choice; it’s impossible to imagine anyone else in the role. The blonde-haired, blue-eyed stunner completely looks the part, of course, but she also radiates the kind of unflagging, exaggerated optimism required for this heightened, candy-coated world. Later, as Barbie’s understanding expands, Robbie masterfully handles the more complicated dialogue by Gerwig and her co-writer and frequent collaborator, filmmaker Noah Baumbach . From a blinding smile to a single tear and every emotion in between, Robbie finds the ideal energy and tone throughout. Her performance is a joy to behold.

And yet, Ryan Gosling is a consistent scene-stealer as he revels in Ken’s himbo frailty. He goes from Barbie’s needy beau to a swaggering, macho doofus as he throws himself headlong into how he thinks a real man should behave. (Viewers familiar with Los Angeles geography will particularly get a kick out of the places that provide his inspiration.) Gosling sells his square-jawed character’s earnestness and gets to tap into his “All New Mickey Mouse Club” musical theater roots simultaneously. He’s a total hoot.

Within the film’s enormous ensemble—where the women are all Barbies and the men are all Kens, with a couple of exceptions—there are several standouts. They include a gonzo Kate McKinnon as the so-called “Weird Barbie” who places Robbie’s character on her path; Issa Rae as the no-nonsense President Barbie; Alexandra Shipp as a kind and capable Doctor Barbie; Simu Liu as the trash-talking Ken who torments Gosling’s Ken; and America Ferrera in a crucial role as a Mattel employee. And we can’t forget Michael Cera as the one Allan, bumbling awkwardly in a sea of hunky Kens—although everyone else forgets Allan.

But while “Barbie” is wildly ambitious in an exciting way, it’s also frustratingly uneven at times. After coming on strong with wave after wave of zippy hilarity, the film drags in the middle as it presents its more serious themes. It’s impossible not to admire how Gerwig is taking a big swing with heady notions during the mindless blockbuster season, but she offers so many that the movie sometimes stops in its propulsive tracks to explain itself to us—and then explain those points again and again. The breezy, satirical edge she established off the top was actually a more effective method of conveying her ideas about the perils of toxic masculinity and entitlement and the power of female confidence and collaboration.

One character delivers a lengthy, third-act speech about the conundrum of being a woman and the contradictory standards to which society holds us. The middle-aged mom in me was nodding throughout in agreement, feeling seen and understood, as if this person knew me and was speaking directly to me. But the longtime film critic in me found this moment a preachy momentum killer—too heavy-handed, too on-the-nose, despite its many insights.  

Still, if such a crowd-pleasing extravaganza can also offer some fodder for thoughtful conversations afterward, it’s accomplished several goals simultaneously. It’s like sneaking spinach into your kid’s brownies—or, in this case, blondies.

Available in theaters on July 21st. 

Christy Lemire

Christy Lemire is a longtime film critic who has written for RogerEbert.com since 2013. Before that, she was the film critic for The Associated Press for nearly 15 years and co-hosted the public television series "Ebert Presents At the Movies" opposite Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, with Roger Ebert serving as managing editor. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

Barbie (2023)

Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language.

114 minutes

Margot Robbie as Barbie

Ryan Gosling as Ken

America Ferrera as Gloria

Will Ferrell as Mattel CEO

Kate McKinnon as Weird Barbie

Ariana Greenblatt as Sasha

Issa Rae as President Barbie

Rhea Perlman as Ruth Handler

Hari Nef as Doctor Barbie

Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie

Alexandra Shipp as Writer Barbie

Michael Cera as Allan

Helen Mirren as Narrator

Simu Liu as Ken

Dua Lipa as Mermaid Barbie

John Cena as Kenmaid

Kingsley Ben-Adir as Ken

Scott Evans as Ken

Jamie Demetriou as Mattel Executive

• Greta Gerwig
• Noah Baumbach

Cinematographer

• Rodrigo Prieto
• Alexandre Desplat
• Mark Ronson

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It’s tough to sell a decades-old doll and actively make you question why you’d still buy a toy that comes with so much baggage. (Metaphorically speaking, of course — literal baggage sold separately.) The makers of Barbie know this. They know that you know that it’s an attempt by Mattel to turn their flagship blonde bombshell into a bona fide intellectual property, coming to a multiplex near you courtesy of Warner Bros. And they’re also well aware that the announcement that Greta Gerwig would be co-writing and directing this movie about everyone’s favorite tiny, leggy bearer of impossible beauty standards suddenly transformed it from “dual corporate cash-in” to “dual corporate cash-in with a very high probability of wit, irony, and someone quoting Betty Friedan and/or Rebecca Walker.”

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Except, in the middle of one of their regular super-cool and totally awesome sing-alongs, Barbie blurts out, “You guys ever think about dying?” No one, least of all the shiny, happy person who said it, has any idea where that random bummer came from. The next morning, Barbie’s imaginary shower is cold. Her imaginary milk has curdled. The collective perkiness of her friends and neighbors only seems to highlight her inexplicably bad mood. Her stiletto-ready arches suddenly fall flat. And then, she comes face to face with what can only be described as the Thanos of the Barbie Cinematic Universe: cellulite.

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Once in our world, Barbie will encounter sexual harassment, gender inequity, the benefits of crying, the CEO of Mattel ( Will Ferrell ) and the mother (America Ferrara) and daughter (Ariana Greenblatt) who’ve introduced such morbid thoughts into her brain. Ken will discover horses, Hummer SUVs, and toxic masculinity . She returns with her new human friends to Barbieland in a state of dazed enlightenment. He comes back as a full-blown Kencel, spreading a gospel of full-frontal dude-ity.

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Critical thinking isn’t mind corruption, of course. Nor is pointing out that you can love something and recognize that it’s flawed or has become inflammatory over time, then striving to fix it. It’s definitely not a bad thing to turn a potential franchise, whether built on a line of dolls or not, into something that refuses to dumb itself down or pander to the lowest common denominator. And the victory that is Gerwig, Robbie, and Gosling — along with a supporting cast and crew that revel in the idea of joining a benefic Barbie party — slipping in heady notions about sexualization, capitalism, social devolution, human rights and self-empowerment, under the guise of a lucrative, brand-extending trip down memory lane? That’s enough to make you giddy. We weren’t kidding about the “subversive” part above; ditto the “blockbuster.” A big movie can still have big ideas in 2023. Even a Barbie movie. Especially a Barbie movie.

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Barbie Review

A hyper-femme roller-coaster ride full of twists and turns as emotional as they are entertaining.

What’s tall and blonde and plastic all over? The subject of what’s shaping up to be the movie of the summer, of course. Barbie is a hyper-femme roller-coaster ride full of twists and turns as emotional as they are entertaining. Greta Gerwig’s triumphant take on the statuesque icon is a poignant picture of the rocky transition from girlhood to womanhood. It’s a powerful celebration of femininity, one that recognizes its contradictions, its joys, its frustrations, its limitations, and its freedoms.

Gerwig brings a nuance to the script (co-written with her personal and professional partner, Noah Baumbach), which both reveres our pretty-in-pink Vitruvian woman while remaining critical of what she’s come to symbolize. Under Gerwig’s direction, Barbies and Kens frolic beneath the sunlit skies of Barbieland. It’s the ultimate dollhouse, the dream Mattel (Barbie’s on- and off-screen manufacturer) has pedaled to children for generations. And, oh , is it pink. Name a shade and expect to find it. Salmon? Check. Rose? You got it. Hot? Just ask that Barbie sun. Millennial? Well what would this movie be without it? But while it brims with possibility and excitement, Barbie’s everyday life is a pattern on repeat – a perfect cycle complete with Lizzo’s earworm of a sitcom-y showtune “Pink.” It’s an illusion of choice where the only option is uniform perfection.

This is the crux of Barbieland. Things are simply as they should be. Women are doctors, reporters, construction workers, Supreme Court justices, the president. And Ken meanwhile is, well, really just Ken. Sarah Greenwood’s production design is stellar, mixing fully functional props with sets more akin to the fantasy of a dollhouse.

Each Barbie and Ken shines in their childlike optimism and enthusiasm, playing to the audience with a charming lack of sophistication. The ensemble cast is brilliant: Issa Rae, Hari Nef, Simu Liu, Ncuti Gatwa, Alexandra Shipp, and their castmates bring enough distinctions to their Barbies and Kens to keep Barbieland from becoming a realm of mindless clones. Like a child’s game of dolls, this is a rollicking society full of personality and interpersonal relationships. Ryan Gosling especially stands out, somehow managing to make a subplot that boils down to “Ken Discovers Sexism” into something that lets us feel for Barbie’s eternal sidekick. His airheaded harmlessness inspires a sort of puppy-dog sympathy that made me agonize over his introduction to the dogmatic misogyny that plagues society.

Robbie is the star of the show, of course. It’s the role she was born for, her megawatt charisma brilliantly matched to the world’s most famous doll. Robbie imbues her performance with a layer of naive optimism that’s slowly torn away by the realities of the Real World (a setting treated as a proper noun in the script and on a prop billboard). It’s heartbreaking to watch. As with Ken, I desperately wanted Barbie to remain ignorant to the social woes of the real world, and watched with dread as she uncovers new layers of self-consciousness. There’s no doubt that Robbie deserves award attention for the awe-inspiring balancing act she nails as the film’s veneer of silliness peels back to reveal something much deeper.

Like Gosling and Margot Robbie, America Ferrera is unquestionably perfect in her role. Growing up an awkward Latina, Ferrera was as much a childhood icon to me as Barbie ever was and it’s thrilling to watch the woman who helped shape my adolescence drive home the most pivotal themes of the movie. As Gloria, a Mattel employee living in the Real World, Ferrera commands gravity as our POV character. She serves as the ultimate reminder that it is our mothers who experienced the complex contradictions of womanhood before us. Beneath the trappings of adulthood remains the child we were, unsure and anxious but moving forward anyway.

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Barbie’s choice to allow its fantasy to seep into the real world is inspired. Yes, this is the reality we know – full of catcallers and cruelty and corporate suits – but it’s not so grittily real that it stifles the fun. The labyrinthine offices of Mattel exemplifies this, and a zany CEO character (Will Ferrell) highlights it. Even the “portal” from the real world to Barbieland commits to this playfulness, introducing a nebulous method of reaching either realm that’s comically childlike but accepted by those in the Real World as a matter of course.

Cycles of life and age act as an important theme in the film. In a stirring moment, Barbie encounters an elderly woman at a bus stop and simply says: “you’re beautiful.” She whispers it with such reverence, as if uttering a cosmic truth about the miracle of aging. To live a life of experience not defined by the number of jobs you’ve had but by the mark of every single day you wake up. It’s a reminder that Barbie is both eternally young and yet also older than many of us.

This is Gerwig’s power: to take an ageless icon of femininity and remind us that as much as she as she defined us, we will forever continue to define her. There’s a deeply held understanding in this film that the capitalist feminism Barbie represents is inherently flawed – women will not find liberation through professional excellence alone, not when entire systems thrive upon our subjugation. Likewise, Gerwig’s film calls into question the limitations of “representation” as a means of social progress. Sure, the Barbies of Barbieland have every job one could possibly imagine. But who sits in the boardroom making every decision about her? If I had one wish, it’s only that we got to dive a little deeper into Barbie’s impact on beauty standards – even if we do get a fun, fourth-wall-breaking joke about it.

That said, there’s such an incisive understanding here of what it means to go from girl to woman. As Barbie “matures,” so to speak, it’s both fraught and wonderful. There’s an insightful beauty in the ending of this film, anchoring Barbie’s mark of growth not in necessarily landing a career, but in, for instance, comfortably accessing women’s healthcare for the very first time.

Brimming with love for a long-standing cultural cornerstone, Barbie reminds us that there’s a safety in childhood we will always inevitably lose. It’s nostalgic and therefore bittersweet. It asks an important question: If the woman society looks to as a guiding example has fears too, why do we put such pressure on ourselves to live without anxieties or regrets? Embrace the unknown, Barbie tells us, and feel comfort in knowing you’re not the first to feel scared.

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a masterful exploration of femininity and the pressures of perfection. This hyper-femme roller-coaster ride boasts meticulous production design, immaculate casting, and a deep-seated reverence for Barbie herself. Margot Robbie sparkles at the center of the film, alongside Ryan Gosling’s airheaded Ken and America Ferrera’s well-meaning Gloria. Ultimately, Barbie is a new, bold, and very pink entry into the cinematic coming-of-age canon. Absolutely wear your pinkest outfit to see this movie, but make sure you bring tissues along too.

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‘Barbie’ Review: Greta Gerwig Goes Way Outside the Box with Her Funny, Feminist Fantasia

Kate erbland, editorial director.

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But just as Kubrick’s apes eventually met by an alien monolith that utterly changed their world and worldview, Greta Gerwig ‘s little girls are about to be descended upon by a world-altering and brain-breaking new entity: a giant, one might even say monolithic, Barbie doll, in the form of a smiling Margot Robbie , kitted out like the very first Barbie doll ever made . And thus spake Barbie . That’s where Gerwig’s funny, feminist, and wildly original “Barbie” begins. It will only get bigger, weirder, smarter, and better from there. Related Stories Paramount Likes Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s Bid Enough to Keep This Train Going ‘The Instigators’ Costumes Pay Tribute to Boston and ‘The Town’

Imagine, if you can, a world split in two upon the release of the first Barbie doll in 1959. There’s the real world (known in the film as, of course, “The Real World”), and then there’s the seemingly idyllic (and very plastic) Barbie Land, which exists on the premise that the invention of Barbie (the doll) so drastically, so completely, and so positively impacted the real world that she (the doll) basically solved feminism. As far as the Barbies (and attendant Kens) who populate Barbie Land know, the Real World is a wonderful place for women (because Barbie Land very much is), and the female-forward world they happily clatter through is just a reflection of what happens in the flesh-and-blood universe.

This Barbie (like, it seems, all Barbies) has a great day every day. Her Stereotypical Ken ( a delightfully unhinged Ryan Gosling )? He only has a good day when Barbie pays attention to him, and Barbie is pretty busy. Gerwig guides us through a typical Barbie day with meticulous attention to detail (both impressive and incredibly amusing). Her Barbie Dream House? It doesn’t have windows, or working stairs, or running water. She can get wherever she wants to go by simply jumping (just like a child might move their doll, foisting them from spot to spot with little care for logic). Her hands are stiff. Her food is nonexistent. Her life is perfect. Robbie’s dedication to the gag, along with co-stars Rae, Shipp, Mackey, Hari Nef, and Nicola Coughlan is profound, and boy, does it pay off.

That truth: She must go to the Real World and mend the rip in the temporal fabric that keeps Barbie Land and the Real World distinctly different. And while Barbie, initially resistant to the fate before her, eventually takes on the challenge with verve and vigor, the questions start piling up: How different are Barbie Land and the Real World? If what happens in the Real World can impact Barbie Land, is the reverse true? And why the hell is Ken in the backseat of Barbie’s hot pink car as it cruises straight into La-La Land?

Once in the Real World, Barbie and Ken’s twinned realizations of what it’s actually like unfold at a lopsided pace. Barbie is confused by everyone’s behavior, not just the men who leer and the women who scoff, but especially that of Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), a sassy teen whom she believes is her longtime owner, the very person suffering from angst so deep it ripped a hole between the Real World and Barbie Land. Gerwig and co-writer and longtime partner Noah Baumbach steadily lift the veil (or, as the case may be, rip their own temporal fabric) as Barbie is beset by the truth of the Real World (not feminist), Barbie Land (also not feminist), and her place in both.

Gerwig and Baumbach’s venture into the Real World is absolutely necessary — it unlocks the film’s thesis after besieging us with diverting fun, gives us the darling Greenblatt and her Barbie-obsessed mom Gloria (America Ferrera, who runs off with the film’s last act), and allows Will Ferrell to go nuts as the wacky (male!) CEO of Mattel. However, it’s not nearly as fun, fantastic, and entertaining as the rich world of Barbie Land — that’s the point. Thankfully, we’re back there soon enough, though it’s been hugely altered by the full force of a returning (and, dare we say it, red-pilled) Ken, who uses all his newfound male rage and patriarchal power to upend what was once a lady-powered idyll. Barbie? She’s having a bad day.

Gerwig, as ever, has assembled a stellar supporting cast. All Barbies delight, but the Kens, appropriately enough, launch a real sneak attack, especially Simu Liu and Kingsley Ben-Adir, and Michael Cera nearly makes off with the whole thing as the singular sidekick Allan. There’s also a murderer’s row of below-the-line talent: Opuses can and will be written about Sarah Greenwood’s production design and Jacqueline Durran’s costumes. “Barbie” is a lovingly crafted blockbuster with a lot on its mind, the kind of feature that will surely benefit from repeat viewings (there is so much to see, so many jokes to catch) and is still purely entertaining even in a single watch.

It’s Barbie’s world, and we’re all just living in it. How fantastic.

Warner Bros. releases “Barbie” in theaters on Friday, July 21.

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‘Barbie’ Review: Out of the Box and On the Road

She’s in the driver’s seat, headed for uncharted territory (flat feet!). But there are limits to how much dimension even Greta Gerwig can give this branded material.

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By Manohla Dargis

Can a doll with an ingratiating smile, impossible curves and boobs ready for liftoff be a feminist icon? That’s a question that swirls through Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” a live-action, you-go-girl fantasia about the world’s most famous doll. For more than half a century, Barbie has been, by turns, celebrated as a font of girlhood pleasure and play, and rebuked as an instrument of toxic gender norms and consumerist ideals of femininity. If Barbie has been a culture-war hot spot for about as long as it’s been on the shelves, it’s because the doll perfectly encapsulates changing ideas about girls and women: our Barbies, ourselves.

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Gerwig carves a comic pathway into these representational thickets partly by means of mythology. In outline, the movie offers a savvy, updated riff on the Greek myth of Pygmalion, which has inspired myriad stories about men and the women they invent. In the original, a male sculptor creates and falls in love with a beautiful statue; in George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” and in the Lerner-Loewe musical “My Fair Lady,” she’s a Cockney flower girl. In “Barbie,” by contrast, it’s the imaginations of the girls and women who play with the doll that give it something like life, a fitting shift for a movie that takes sisterhood as a starting point.

These imaginers first and foremost include Gerwig herself. The movie opens with a prelude that parodies the “dawn of man” sequence in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (with girls, not ape-men), and then shifts to Barbie Land, a kaleidoscopic wonderland. There, Gerwig sets the scene and tone with Barbie (Margot Robbie) — who calls herself stereotypical Barbie — soon floating out of her Dreamhouse, as if she were being lifted by a giant invisible hand. It’s a witty auteurist flourish. The Mattel brand looms large here, but Gerwig, whose directorial command is so fluent she seems born to filmmaking, is announcing that she’s in control.

‘Barbie’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Greta gerwig, the co-writer and director of “barbie,” narrates this musical sequence, including ryan gosling’s performance of the song “i’m just ken.”.

“My name is Greta Gerwig, and I am the co-writer and director of ‘Barbie.’” “(SINGING) I’m just Ken. Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” “The thing that I can say most about this sequence is that this was the thing that I most knew what I wanted it to be, and no one else knew what I wanted it to be. Every time I look at this, it’s just the ridiculousness of how we did it, which is they’re obviously arriving on these pedalos on a beach that has no water. It’s a solid mass with these waves that are sculptures. And I had everyone in this scene pretend to be moving in slow motion except for Ryan, who’s singing. And I think I got four takes into it, and I thought, this just — is this so ridiculous that I’m doing pretend slow motion? But then I thought, I think I just have to commit. Now I’ve done it. There’s nothing else I can do. My stunt coordinator, Roy Taylor, who’s a brilliant, brilliant person, and he worked with my choreographer, Jenny White, because I wanted all the fighting to be somewhere between dancing and a kind of vaudevillian ridiculousness of a Buster Keaton or a Charlie Chaplin. I love that kind of physical comedy. So you see men tangoing in the background in addition to fighting. Because they’re Kens, they’re children. It all sort of goes together.” “Ah!” “Ah! Ah!” “Then we have our Barbies, who are sort of watching with their pink boilersuits, which I think Jacqueline Durran, who is the costume designer, she did the pink boilersuits because I wore boilersuits every day. And she was like, I’ve decided what the Barbies will wear when they’re taking back Barbieland. And I cried when I saw it because I was like, oh, it’s a tribute to me. So much of this sequence is the song that Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt wrote, which was not in the script. But I did ask them because they were writing the song that became Dua Lipa’s ‘Dance the Night.’ I said we need a Ken song, and I think it goes in the battle. And then they wrote this song from the perspective of Ken. And then I said, Ryan, are you up for singing this? And he said yes, ultimately. But initially, I don’t know. I think he was like, you never said anything about this at the beginning. But I think they sent me 30 seconds of an idea for the song, that I just loved. And then I was like, Can you make it 11 minutes long? Because I want it to go through this whole sequence. And then this part, this dream ballet part, Sarah Greenwood, who is a production designer, and Katie Spencer built this stage to echo the dream ballet stage from ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ because I love that movie. And that has one of the best dream ballets of all time because they have a dream ballet that is inside of another dream ballet, which, I think, when people are like, will anyone understand this? I was like, yes. There is a context for this. They’ll grasp it. And every Ken, every Barbie, is a dancer the whole time. And then I chose all the actors, too, because they were good dancers. Jenny White, who was my choreographer, she and I looked at a lot of different musicals, different dream ballets. But Busby Berkeley was a huge reference.” “(SINGING) I’m just Ken. Anywhere else, I’d be a ten.” “I kind of love that ‘we’re putting on a show’ element of this movie, which is very connected to theater and also the pleasure of making something in a childlike way. And we started with dance rehearsals, and I think it was a good way to put everybody in that mindset of it’s not about perfection. It’s about this joy. And they obviously embodied that. In a way, you want the audience to walk out and say, I’d like to go make something. I want to go play. I want to go set something up. I want to do a performance. And that’s how I felt when I watched a lot of movies when I was a kid, or theater. I instantly was like, I’m going to organize my own version of ‘Starlight Express’ right now.” “(SINGING) Nobody else Nobody else I’m just Ken.”

Written by Gerwig and her partner, Noah Baumbach, the movie introduces Barbie on yet another perfect day in Barbie Land, in which dolls played by humans exist in what resembles a toyland gated community. There, framed by a painted mountain range, Barbie and a diverse group of other Barbies rule, living in homes with few exterior walls. With their flat roofs, clean lines and pink décor — a spherical TV, Eero Saarinen-style tulip table and chairs — the overarching look evokes the era when Barbie first hit the market. It’s very Palm Springs circa 1960, an aesthetic that could be called bubble-gum midcentury modern.

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Barbie First Reactions: Witty, Impeccably Designed, Overblown Fun

Critics on social media say gerta gerwig's take on the iconic doll blends camp and social commentary and benefits from a scene-stealing ryan gosling..

TAGGED AS: Comedy , First Reactions , movies

Here’s what critics are saying about Barbie :

Does Barbie live up to the hype?

“Greta Gerwig somehow exceeded my expectations. She tackles the positives and negatives of Barbie so beautifully.” – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

“ Barbie isn’t the home run I was hoping for, or that I think it needs to be given the topics it’s tackling, but it’s still a well made, bold film with a VERY strong voice and vision, one that often made me think, HOW does this movie exist? And that right there is almost always a quality in a film that will win me over.” – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

“It teeters between the camp Barbie movie we expected and a sometimes too on-the-nose social commentary of society that takes away from important subplots and character development… Overall I left wanting a bit more from the film.” – Sharronda Williams, Pay or Wait

“ Barbie is currently my favorite film of the year.” – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

(Photo by ©Warner Bros.)

How are the performances?

“I was living for the dance numbers led by Simu Liu!” – Carla Renata, The Curvy Film Critic

“Ryan Gosling is a scene stealer delivering most of the laughs while Margot Robbie’s heartfelt performance will tug at your heartstrings.” – Sharronda Williams, Pay or Wait

“Give Ryan Gosling an Oscar nomination, I’m dead serious!” – Jamie Jirak, ComicBook.com

What about the script?

“As for the story, that’s where I’m a bit more mixed. I think the film serves Margot Robbie’s Barbie and her journey especially well, but there are other characters experiencing important arcs that needed more screen time to really dig into and explore to the fullest.” – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

“While I enjoyed most of the film the screenplay feels bloated at times.” – Sharronda Williams, Pay or Wait

Anything else impressive about it?

“The craftsmanship is incredible. In particular, the costume and production design includes next-level work that heavily contributes to creating the feeling that these truly are Barbies, their dream houses, and their worlds come to life.” – Perri Nemiroff, Collider

“The production and costume design is stunning.” – Sharronda Williams, Pay or Wait

“Greta Gerwig left me all in my feelings as did the production design, costumes, hair and makeup!” – Carla Renata, The Curvy Film Critic

“ Barbie is witty, heartfelt, and downright fun at times.” – Sharronda Williams, Pay or Wait

“It’s overblown fun with a feminist twist.” – Carla Renata, The Curvy Film Critic

Barbie opens in theaters everywhere on July 21, 2023.

On an Apple device? Follow Rotten Tomatoes on Apple News.

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