Barbie

It's cute, it's funny and smart, it looks and sounds beautiful, but I felt like I'd seen it before. Rather than the copycat of The Lego Movie that the trailer smacked of, Barbie ends up reminding me of a run-of-the-mill but still more than good Pixar film. But I really like the campaign around the film, which for the first time in a long time (at least where I live, anyway) managed to get a lot of people excited about going to the cinema wearing something pink, from a baseball cap to a bathrobe, and just go have fun. That's good. (29/07/2023)

Heaps of creative ideas and social commentary that after half an hour feels like out of a machine-gun, and the rest of the running time is just recycled. Moreover, Barbie is too shrill and dramatically inconsistent. After an hour, I wished it would end. The acting is unsurprisingly good, at times funnily accurate in reflecting the problems of contemporary society, but I don't quite get the commercial success and worldwide hype around Barbie. (02/12/2023)

Definitely a Meta film, a great financial success, playful and clever filmmaking, with an excellent Robbie and Gosling, great dance numbers and songs, good philosophical musings to ponder, enjoyable cameos and an originally conceived world. A few things are annoying and cringeworthy, but I surprisingly enjoyed it. The best part is definitely Barbie's trip to our world – it's a shame they don’t spend more time, as there were a few humorous interludes – but the patriarchy in Barbie's world had its moments too. Hard to rate, I don't need to see it again, but it entertained me. 65% (26/09/2023)

In terms of experience, it’s five stars. It's a riveting, visually stunning, imaginative, fun ride with a fabulous Margot Robbie and an even more fabulous Ryan Gosling. It's a pleasure to see a big-budget film that totally breaks away from the uniform grey that blockbuster Hollywood usually offers today. But the voice of reason complains timidly about the script's underdeveloped supporting (human) characters and the sometimes annoyingly literal feminist cannonade in the final act, when it seems as if they wanted every argument they could think of to be heard. So, four stars. (19/07/2023)

It's remarkable that even though Barbie is such a phenomenon, it wasn't until 2023 that a live-action film version arrived in cinemas, after dozens of animated films. But maybe there was a reason for that: does the iconic doll have the potential to pull off a feature film? Greta Gerwig created a colourful world full of different characters, which at times evokes the work of Wes Anderson, and cast some pretty big names in the main and supporting roles. I saw the trailers and wondered if they had prepared a surprise for the audience, and (unfortunately) they didn't. Barbie's message is clear and very bluntly delivered, and by the end of the film, I found the literalness annoying – it was as if they had given up on the audience reading between the lines and just threw everything, including footnotes and explanatory notes, onto their plates. From an audiovisual point of view, this is a film that stands out all the more in the cinema, and the scene with Barbie's "mother", Ruth Handler, was truly magical. But the film is tripped by its over-underestimation of the viewer's perception - at times I felt as if I was watching a visual supplement to a textbook on feminism, patriarchy, prejudice and stereotypes. (22/07/2023)