Barbie

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)

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)

I didn't fall for it. At its very core, Barbie is as shallow and superficial as what it mocks all along. I can totally see the brainstorming sessions between the Mattel and Warner Brothers executives, in roundtables similar to the one Will Ferrell had in the film: "Hey, we need to boost the sales of our rubber dolls, how about we make some seemingly socially critical pulp fiction, wrap it in basic lessons about the workings of the patriarchy and the status of women in society, and just take a little dig at our corporation on the side to make it look self-aware to the naysayers of our product line.... ". Well, what comes out of a corporation making fun of corporatist? Yes, just corporate toothless humor, created on commission, and made to answer to those at the top who pay for it. PS: I'll slap two stars, for the opening (really funny) reminiscence of A Space Odyssey and then for the brief scene where Margot tells a naturally aged woman that she's beautiful. That's what the Botox princesses, led by Nicole Kidman, should be playing in a loop to light up their barbie heads. (13/12/2023)

The exploration of the real world by people coming from Barbie Land is stimulating and original and hints at the promise of a clever, fresh and original satire reflecting the pseudo-problems of contemporary (western) society. But the potential inherent in that is cut dead by the subsequent “gender conflict” and its childish resolution to which the film resorts. And that’s a shame. Even the balance of entertainment for children and adults doesn’t work here, since the movie is not for kids at all. But let’s be glad that audiences are returning in large numbers to cinemas now that the pandemic is over. Barbie deserves thanks for that. And special praise goes to the originator of the brilliant “Barbenheimer” marketing concept, though the hardworking crew around Tom Cruise didn’t deserve to have M:I-7 overshadowed. (16/08/2023)

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)