Critics reviews

The result is a good-natured but self-conscious movie, whose comedy is rooted in that very self-consciousness, often funny, occasionally very funny, but sometimes also somehow demure and inhibited, as if the urge to be funny can only be mean and satirical.

It's not just a genuinely funny and warm-hearted live-action comedy – and there aren't many of those around these days – but an art-house passion project so bold, inventive and politically charged that it is sure to be nominated for all sorts of awards.

Barbie isn't just a movie that could never fully escape out from under the weight of its artistic compromises. It's a hoot, a feast for the eyes and ears... It's a movie that sits at an interesting inflection point in moviemaking and movie consumption, when almost every idea seems born from a pre-existing product... Barbie lays that tension bare and exposed in its unabashed commercialism and heightened sensiblities, so that you can't not think about how its aims may be at odds with its execution.

The anxiety that manifests in Barbie... [is] the anxiety of a director who’s crossed over into the Hollywood big league but wants us to know that she knows that we know that she’s smarter than the material. The result is a film both pro and anti-Barbie, earnest and cynical at once.

Barbie is one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory – a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism.

Greta Gerwig delivers a new kind of ambitious and giddily entertaining blockbuster that boasts two definitive performances from actors already in their stride.

While Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach may couch this self-discovery narrative in powder pinks and unrelenting pep, their message is authentic and acerbic: an urgent feminist call to arms wrapped up in a hugely entertaining popcorn movie.

It blazes its way into a strange and bold future where adapting a film from a corporate toy franchise doesn’t immediately feel ugly and anti-art: instead it is vibrant, tongue-in-cheek, and warm-hearted. It makes its points about patriarchy and feminism without ever jabbing its finger at you.

Gerwig's chief focus with Barbie is to give voice to the girls and young women encountering the sexist double standards put upon them by using a doll that's been a blessing and a curse on that point. It's a candy-coated intro to feminism.

Combining the meta jokiness with a heap of motivational sincerity is no easy task, but Barbie is a very charming success, an odyssey of self-improvement for a plastic idol whose reason for being is to never change, to always be the same perfect ideal. As with Gerwig’s previous two movies—the wildly successful Lady Bird and Little Women—it’s a clever meditation on the nightmarish puzzle of simply trying to exist as a woman in society, only with more Day-Glo outfits.

Viewers who have nurtured a loving if complicated relationship with Barbie might feel seen by the end of the film. Whether they’ll feel satisfied is another question entirely — especially when it comes to the film’s letdown of an ending, which was no doubt perfect on the page but lands with a deflating, didactic thud.

[I]t’s not the aim of “Barbie” to darken your mood as a fun and abundantly populist studio picture, in which Gerwig presents the audience with various Kentastic musical tracks and in one stupendous instance that shouldn’t be spoiled, a friendly middle-finger to Matchbox Twenty through Gosling’s fearless performance.