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Barbie review: Welcome to Greta Gerwig's fiercely funny, feminist Dreamhouse

The Barbie movie could’ve been another forgettable, IP-driven cash grab. Instead, the director of Little Women and Lady Bird has crafted a neon pink delight.

Devan Coggan (rhymes with seven slogan) is a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. Most of her personality is just John Mulaney quotes and Lord of the Rings references.

When Warner Bros. announced plans to launch a Barbie movie, the entire premise sounded a bit like a game of Hollywood Mad Libs gone wrong: Quick, name a beloved indie director ( Greta Gerwig !), an unadapted piece of intellectual property (Barbie dolls!), and an adjective (neon pink!). Every new piece of information that trickled out on the (lengthy) press tour seemed stranger than the last. Gerwig ( Lady Bird , Little Women ) cited 2001: A Space Odyssey and Gene Kelly musicals as her biggest inspirations. Elaborate dance numbers were teased. Ryan Gosling gave a lot of quotes about something called " Kenergy ." What actually was this movie, and could it possibly live up to all that hot pink buzz?

The verdict? Never doubt Gerwig. The Oscar-nominated filmmaker has crafted a fierce, funny, and deeply feminist adventure that dares you to laugh and cry, even if you're made of plastic. It's certainly the only summer blockbuster to pair insightful criticisms of the wage gap with goofy gags about Kens threatening to "beach" each other off.

The film (in theaters this Friday) whisks viewers away to Barbie Land, a candy-colored toy box wonderland of endless sunshine. It's there that our titular heroine ( Margot Robbie ) spends her days, each just as magical and neon as the one before. There are always other Barbies to party with — including Doctor Barbie ( Hari Nef ), President Barbie ( Issa Rae ), and Mermaid Barbie ( Dua Lipa ) — as well as an endless supply of devoted Kens, led by Gosling's frequently shirtless boy-toy. It's a plastic paradise for Robbie's Stereotypical Barbie, the type of doll that immediately comes to mind when you think of Barbie.

But something's gone wrong. Her Malibu Dreamhouse malfunctions; her mind is clouded by un-Barbie-like thoughts of death; and her perfectly arched feet now fall flat on the floor. So, our heroine sets out to seek some answers from Barbie Land's pseudo mystic, Weird Barbie ( Kate McKinnon ), who says a rift has opened up between their world and the real world, and she must brave the long trek to Los Angeles to find the human playing with her doll to remedy the situation. You bet her ever-loyal Ken (Gosling) is coming along for the ride.

Once Barbie and Ken begin roller-blading around L.A., however, they both realize that they've essentially entered a mirror dimension. Where are the female presidents, the CEOs, the astronauts? Barbie was supposed to empower young girls to dream big, but she hasn't had the feminist effect she anticipated — and in fact, she might have made things worse. Gerwig tackles the doll's complicated legacy head on, exploring how Barbie's reputation here isn't one of leadership or creativity but of corporatized objectification. Barbie herself is horrified, facing crude comments and misogyny for the first time in her (plastic) life. But to Ken, this newfound idea of patriarchy is intoxicating, and he quickly enters a spiral of masculinity, luxuriating in trucks, cowboy hats, and the addictive thrill of power.

Gosling has already scored praise for his earnest himbo performance, and in truth, he steals the show. For an actor who's spent much of his career brooding moodily (see: Blade Runner 2049 , Drive , First Man ), here, he finally gets to tap into his inner Mouseketeer , dramatically draping himself at Barbie's feet or breaking into a shirtless power ballad called "I'm Just Ken." His Ken has very little going on inside his brain, but his heart is brimming with emotion: love and admiration for Barbie, a longing for masculine validation, and a wide-eyed curiosity about the world around him.

Robbie still remains the real star of Barbie . Physically, the blonde Australian actress already looks like she stepped out of a Mattel box (something the film itself plays on during one particular gag), but she gives an impressively transformative performance, moving her arms and joints like they're actually made of plastic. Robbie has brought a manic physicality to previous films including Babylon and Birds of Prey , but she now embraces physical comedy to the max. (At one point, she face-plants on the floor, limbs askew like a toy dropped by a toddler.) As Barbie begins to discover more about the real world, Robbie's performance gradually shifts to become more human. One of the most moving moments comes about halfway through the film, as Barbie perches quietly on a park bench, silently observing the humans around her.

If the film has a flaw, it's that Barbie and Ken are so delightful that their real-world counterparts feel dull by comparison. America Ferrera and Ariana Greenblatt play a frazzled mother and her sardonic teen daughter, who've drifted apart over time. Ferrera fills her days at her boring Mattel office job by doodling alternative Barbies, ones that are plagued by cellulite or haunted by thoughts of death. Her feminist daughter is dismissive of everything Barbie represents, dressing down Robbie with a pointed sneer. Ferrera admirably delivers one of the film's biggest emotional speeches, but surprisingly, the human characters never feel quite as lived-in as their plastic doll companions.

Still, Barbie works hard to entertain both 11-year-old girls and the parents who'll bring them to the theater. Gerwig co-wrote the script with her partner and longtime collaborator Noah Baumbach , and the entire screenplay is packed with winking one-liners, the kind that reward a rewatch. The fear is that Hollywood will learn the wrong message from Barbie, rushing to green-light films about every toy gathering dust on a kid's playroom floor. (What's next, The Funko Pop Movie? Furby: Fully Loaded? We already have a Bobbleheads movie , so maybe we're already there.) But it's Gerwig's care and attention to detail that gives Barbie an actual point of view , elevating it beyond every other cynical, IP-driven cash grab. Turns out that life in plastic really can be fantastic. Grade: A-

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‘barbie’ review: margot robbie and ryan gosling in doll comedy from greta gerwig that delivers the fun but fudges the politics.

Barbie and Ken venture into the real world to try to save Barbieland in this fantasy adventure from the director of 'Lady Bird' and 'Little Women.'

By Lovia Gyarkye

Lovia Gyarkye

Arts & Culture Critic

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Margot Robbie as Barbie and Ryan Gosling as Ken and in Barbie

There isn’t exactly a God in Greta Gerwig ’s Barbie (unless you count Helen Mirren’s omniscient narrator), but the director does experiment with creation myths. Barbieland, a parallel universe populated by iterations of the Mattel doll, is her sandbox. The toy conglomerate’s vast archive, a trove of successful products, middling ideas and discontinued merch, are the tools.

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

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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 Bob Bakish Expected to Resign as Paramount CEO Amid Skydance Merger Talks Sony Delays New ‘Karate Kid’ Movie to 2025 to Accommodate Final Season of ‘Cobra Kai’

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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Margot Robbie, dressed in head-to-toe pink, drives a pink convertible with Ryan Gosling, also in pink, in the back seat. They’re driving through the desert, with a sign reading Barbie Land behind them.

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.

Gerwig has fun in Barbie Land, and in her role as a friendly playmate, she works hard to ensure you do too. She takes you for a leisurely spin, cranks the tunes, stages some old-school, Hollywood-style musical numbers and brings in those eternal sidekicks, the Kens (with a scene-stealing Ryan Gosling chief among them). The production design (Sarah Greenwood) and costumes (Jacqueline Durran) offer ticklish pleasure but also underscore this place’s artificiality. Barbie, et al., are of our world and not, existing in a plasticky paradise that proves less hospitable when she begins having un-Barbie thoughts and experiences: She thinks of death, and then her feet, which are molded to fit high heels, go flat.

This change to Barbie’s body is played for laughs — the other Barbies are horrified — but it’s crucial to the plot and to Gerwig’s intentions. Once Barbie’s feet touch the ground, she seeks advice from a misfit version of the doll (the invaluable Kate McKinnon), who prescribes Birkenstocks and a trip to the real world. Soon, Barbie — with Ken riding shotgun — journeys into something like reality; that they land in Los Angeles reads like a puckish joke. There, Barbie is astonished to discover sexism, and Ken is delighted to discover patriarchy, contrapuntal revelations that generate further comedy and something like enlightenment.

Gerwig handles the transition between realms smoothly, but even in this bouncy, happy movie, reality proves a bummer. It’s amusing when Barbie points out a billboard filled with women, mistaking them for the Supreme Court because that’s what the court looks like in Barbie Land, just with more pink. She learns how wrong she was, which is to Gerwig’s point. But the weight of our world, emblematized at least for this viewer by the real Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade , proves unbearably heavy. However politically sharp, the gag is an unpleasant reminder of all the profoundly unfunny ways in which this world, with its visible and invisible hands, tries to control women, putting them into little boxes.

Mattel has long tried to reconcile Barbie with the real world. The toy’s origins lie with Ruth Handler, a founder of Mattel who wanted to make a doll for girls like her daughter, Barbara. Handler found her inspiration in Europe with an adult-looking German doll called Bild Lilli that Mattel reconfigured. Some buyers pushed back: “The idea of a doll with breasts was not received well,” Handler said in a 1994 Lilith magazine interview.

Barbie’s breasts and the rest of her continued to generate criticism, including from physicians who treat body dysmorphia . In recent years, Mattel has tried to make the doll more culturally relevant, adding careers and not just new merch to its product portfolio. “When a girl plays with Barbie she imagines everything she can become,” a 2015 Mattel ad promised during a period of sluggish sales. Its Fashionistas line introduced new facial shapes, eye colors and skin tones, followed by petite, curvy and tall versions, a diversity that has paid off . In 2019, Mattel announced that this Barbie movie was going forward with Robbie as the star.

As a performer, Robbie always pops onscreen, and her turn here as a classic blond bombshell who has more going on than that sexist stereotype suggests is charming and subtly phased; you can see the light turn on gradually behind her eyes. Like America Ferrera’s sympathetic Mattel employee, Robbie warms the movie, expanding and deepening its emotions. That’s particularly necessary because Ken’s comic obtuseness and arc — as well as Gosling’s deadpan and boy-band dance moves — recurrently draw attention away from the actress and her character. However narratively motivated, this upstaging of Barbie effectively suggests that only the Kens of the world need their consciousness raised.

The real world may initially bewilder Barbie, but she figures it out. That’s just what you’d expect given that Mattel partnered with Warner Bros. for this movie and is banking big on it . For her part, Gerwig figures it out by vibing on joy, tapping into nostalgia, showcasing her large cast (Will Ferrell, Issa Rae, Simu Liu, Dua Lipa, Helen Mirren, Michael Cera, etc.) and, for the most part, dodging the thorny contradictions and the criticisms that cling to the doll. And while Gerwig does slip in a few glints of critique — as when a teenage girl accuses Barbie of promoting consumerism, shortly before she pals up with our heroine — these feel more like mere winks at the adults in the audience than anything else.

Like “Air,” Ben Affleck’s recent movie about how Nike signed Michael Jordan, as well as other entertainments tethered to their consumer subjects, “Barbie” can only push so hard. These movies can’t damage the goods, though I’m not sure most viewers would want that; our brands, ourselves, after all. That said, Gerwig does much within the material’s inherently commercial parameters, though it isn’t until the finale — capped by a sharply funny, philosophically expansive last line — that you see the “Barbie” that could have been. Gerwig’s talents are one of this movie’s pleasures, and I expect that they’ll be wholly on display in her next one — I just hope that this time it will be a house of her own wildest dreams.

Barbie Rated PG-13 for playful fighting and peril. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters.

Audio produced by Kate Winslett .

Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic of The Times, which she joined in 2004. She has an M.A. in cinema studies from New York University, and her work has been anthologized in several books. More about Manohla Dargis

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Review: With Robbie in pink and Gosling in mink, ‘Barbie’ (wink-wink) will make you think

A woman smiles in front of a mirror inside a pink doll house

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Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie,” an exuberant, sometimes exhaustingly clever piece of Mattelian neorealism, opens with an extended, heavily trailer-spoiled homage to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” We’re at a drab early moment in the history of the toy industry; for too long, little girls everywhere have had only their sad, uninspiring baby dolls to play with — until now, at this fateful dawn-of-mannequin moment. Hello, dolly! But really, hello, Barbie, played by Margot Robbie with a megawatt grin and impeccable coiffure, modeling a black-and-white swimsuit and towering over the primordial landscape on skyscraper legs. She’s a marvel of (anatomically incorrect) engineering, a citadel of plasticine perfection and, to judge by her immense popularity, a major evolutionary leap forward.

Whether or not Barbie has ever represented an advance, of course, has been fiercely debated since Ruth Handler created her in 1959. Did Barbie, with her can-do spirit and variegated career possibilities, offer young girls a positive model of be-whatever-you-want-to-be womanhood? Or did her bombshell proportions and impossible chest-to-waist ratio entrench the kinds of cruelly unforgiving beauty standards that second-wave feminism was just beginning to interrogate?

Decades later, conversations around female self-image, representation, agency and empowerment have shifted, to say the least, as have personal and public attitudes toward Barbie herself. She has been attacked and defended, dismissed as a punchline and reclaimed as a pioneer. She has diversified with the times (new races, new body types and, as always, new clothes). In recent years, she’s also experienced plummeting sales and a diminished cultural profile, which of course explains why — after countless small-screen animated Barbie movies, series and specials — she now has a live-action theatrical feature to call her own.

(l-r) Ryan Gosling as Ken and Margot Robbie as Barbie in 'Barbie.'

Opinion: Yes, Barbie is a feminist — just don’t ask her creators

Looking at her history and evolution, Barbie is clearly a strong, independent woman — the sort advocated by all four waves of feminism.

July 16, 2023

Really, though, that explains this movie only in part. Whatever you think of “Barbie,” the mere existence of this smart, funny, conceptually playful, sartorially dazzling comic fantasy speaks to the irreverent wit and meta-critical sensibility of its director. (It also owes something, I suppose, to Mattel’s willingness to endure some modestly scathing satire in the pursuit of ever-greater profits.) Working again with her co-writer, Noah Baumbach (“Mistress America,” “Frances Ha”), Gerwig has conceived “Barbie” as a bubble-gum emulsion of silliness and sophistication, a picture that both promotes and deconstructs its own brand. It doesn’t just mean to renew the endless “Barbie: good or bad?” debate. It wants to enact that debate, to vigorously argue both positions for the better part of two fast-moving, furiously multitasking hours.

A blond woman in a striped bathing suit standing in a stark, prehistoric landscape

The case for the Barbie defense is presented by the Barbies themselves. There are a lot of them walking, talking, dancing, doing the splits and consuming nonexistent meals in the groovy pinktacular paradise that is Barbie Land, where life is a beach party by day and a dance party by night. The Barbies dwell in sisterly harmony and blissful self-fulfillment, each with her own meticulously furnished Barbie Dreamhouse and endlessly colorful wardrobe. Each one also has her role to play, whether she’s President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney) or even Mermaid Barbie (Dua Lipa), popping up from behind some delightfully fake-looking ocean waves. (If you’ll permit a “Barbenheimer” joke, I must point out the existence of Emma Mackey as Physicist Barbie, who presumably discovered the secrets of nuclear fuchsian.)

Tiptoeing into the spotlight on perfectly arched feet is Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie, whose self-mocking name and lead-heroine status are a handy example of Gerwig’s have-it-both-ways attitude. Although surrounded by Barbies (and Kens, but more on them later) of various shapes, sizes and colors, Stereotypical Barbie is Barbie: white, blond and svelte, in line with our earliest, most lasting impressions of the doll formally named Barbara Millicent Roberts. To say that Robbie is perfectly cast is an understatement (her surname alone could be a Barbie/Roberts portmanteau), though that very perfection underscores the movie’s problem: Can you really call out and perpetuate a stereotype at the same time? Would it have been better — more daring, and also more interesting — to tell the story from a less classically molded Barbie’s perspective?

Perhaps that possibility will be taken up in future visits to what is already being mapped out as a full-blown Mattel cinematic universe. For now, this early adventure generates more than enough goodwill to sustain your curiosity and suspend, or at least temporarily overwhelm, your reservations. Drawing on the breathless narrative velocity and sly comic mischief she showed in her sparkling recent adaptation of “Little Women,” Gerwig maintains a delirious but remarkably coherent onslaught of gags, twists, ideas, non sequiturs (Michael Cera! Matchbox 20!) and scholarly bits of Barbie arcana — all of it swirling like a merry comic tornado around the serene center of gravity that is Robbie’s captivatingly sincere performance.

Three men in headbands striking a sporty pose

Like Amy Adams as a fish-out-of-water Disney princess in “Enchanted,” Robbie takes an archetype long dismissed as an airheaded caricature and, moment by deeply felt moment, teases and fleshes her out. With her radiant smiles and goofy-graceful physicality, she inhabits Barbie’s glamour and entitlement as effortlessly as she inhabits her hot-pink bell bottoms. But she also gradually punctures those upbeat vibes with tremulous notes of vulnerability and premonitions of disaster, right around the time her Barbie notices a patch of cellulite and begins having incongruous thoughts of death.

These intimations of mortality, which I wouldn’t have minded hearing about in even gnarlier detail, suggest cracks in Barbie’s psyche, but also in Barbie Land’s very foundations. To explain further would risk giving away the strange metaphysical rules that govern Barbie Land, its fantastic-plastic inhabitants and their tricky relationship to the real world. And that real world is ultimately Barbie’s destination, a place she sets out for in search of answers, not realizing that her own attention-starved Ken has stowed away in her little pink Corvette.

Ah yes, Ken. There are several Kens in this movie, all of them amiable second-class citizen hunks of Barbie Land, played by actors including Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Scott Evans and Ncuti Gatwa. But Gosling, as the neediest, most pathetically insecure Ken of the lot, rises to delicious new levels of actorly self-mockery. Sporting a platinum dye job that never fails to match his denim cutoffs, ’90s neon workout gear, pastel-striped beachwear and luxurious mink coat (sold separately), Gosling scores the expected laughs about Ken’s fashionista vanity , ambiguous sexuality and all-around preening petulance. But what makes him more than just another smooth-chested punchline is one of Gerwig’s deftest satirical touches: As it turns out, it doesn’t take long for a dude with serious self-esteem issues to open a Pandora’s box of patriarchal oppression.

Los Angeles, CA - June 26: Actor Ryan Gosling and director Greta Gerwig, photographed in promotion of their latest film, "Barbie," at the Four Seasons hotel, in Los Angeles, CA, Monday, June 26, 2023. Gosling plays "Ken," Barbie's boyfriend, in Barbie Land and he joins her in visiting the human world. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times)

Ryan Gosling and Greta Gerwig on how Ken became the subversive center of ‘Barbie’

Star Ryan Gosling and director Greta Gerwig open up about Ken’s journey to toxic masculinity and back in their comedy based on the iconic Mattel toys.

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For toxic masculinity, though unheard of in Barbie Land, is of course alive and well in the real world, as Barbie and Ken are initially shocked to learn when they arrive on the sunny streets of Los Angeles. Here, women aren’t respected, let alone placed on polymer pedestals; they’re ogled, objectified, sidelined and worse. And to hear it from an angry teenager named Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), Barbie herself deserves her share of the blame, being a tool of “sexualized capitalism” that “set the feminist movement back years.”

That’s the case for the Barbie prosecution, in a nutshell, and as you might expect, it isn’t allowed to go unchallenged. Sasha’s attack is the first of the script’s two big throw-down scenes; the second is a rousing feminist cri de coeur delivered by Sasha’s mom, Gloria (a winning America Ferrera), who’s on hand to temper her daughter’s scorn, emphasize Barbie’s enduring multigenerational appeal and remind us that, yes, you can love women and love Barbie too. It’s a hugely effective monologue, calculated for maximum applause and likely to get it. But “Barbie’s” feminism, something it wears proudly on its sequined sleeve, seldom needs such emphatic dramatic underlining to register.

The movie is at its best when it’s simply leaning into its own fast, funny, free-floating goofiness, whether it’s letting Kate McKinnon do her thing as a self-explanatory Weird Barbie, pitting multiple dancing Kens against each other in a hypnotic dream ballet, or throwing in a coconutty reference to “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” I could’ve done without the filler-ish comic subplot featuring Will Ferrell as Mattel’s CEO, a mostly toothless bit of corporate ribbing that nonetheless does lead to a visually striking chase sequence through a maze of office cubicles, cleverly staged as a riff on Jacques Tati’s classic “Playtime.”

Gerwig’s wide-ranging movie love serves her well here; there’s something fitting and finally moving about the way Barbie’s journey of self-discovery takes her through a glittery funhouse of cinematic allusions. If Barbie Land can’t help but evoke the creepily self-contained utopia of “The Truman Show,” Barbie’s entire quest unfolds like a kind of reverse “Wizard of Oz,” in which she ends up leaving a trippy Technicolor dreamscape and traveling to a humdrum, grayed-out reality rather than the other way around. You might sense echoes of those films during this movie’s strange, beguiling final moments, and perhaps a callback to “2001” too. The evolution of Barbie continues.

'Barbie'

Rating: PG-13, for suggestive references and brief language Running time: 1 hour, 54 minutes Playing: Starts July 21 in general release

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Hollywood, CA - March 10: Ryan Gosling during the live telecast of the 96th Annual Academy Awards in Dolby Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center in Hollywood, CA, Sunday, March 10, 2024. (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

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Barbie review – a riotous, candy-coloured feminist fable

Barbie takes a ride from her dream house to reality as Little Women writer-director Greta Gerwig takes another cultural icon and lovingly subverts it

W riter-director Greta Gerwig’s cinematic reinvention of Mattel’s most (in)famous toy comes on like a sugar-rush mashup of Pixar’s Toy Story 2 , Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio , the cult live-action feature Josie and the Pussycats and the Roger Ebert-scripted exploitation romp Beyond the Valley of the Dolls . It’s a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject. Audiences will be delighted. Mattel should be ecstatic.

After a heavily trailered 2001 -parody opening, we move to a pastel pink haven in which, “thanks to Barbie , all problems of feminism and equal rights have been solved”. This is Barbieland – a fantasy world in which big-haired dolls can be anything (lawyers, doctors, physicists, presidents), thereby inspiring equivalent feminine achievement out there in the “real world”. (“We fixed everything so all women in the real world are happy and powerful!”)

Like a dreamy version of the nightmarish Being John Malkovich , everyone here is Barbie. Except the men, who are just Ken. Or Allan (a hapless Michael Cera ). But mainly just Ken – an appendage without an appendage. At the centre of all this self-referential fluff is producer-star Margot Robbie’s “Stereotypical Barbie” – a role so perfect that when Helen Mirren’s narrator makes a sardonic gag about the casting, no one minds. So it comes as a surprise when this habitually smiley creature finds herself haunted by thoughts of sadness, anxiety and death. Worse still, she develops flat feet and (whisper it!) cellulite – two horsemen of the Barbie apocalypse.

A visit to Kate McKinnon’s “Weird Barbie” (“she was played with too hard ”) reveals that a wormhole has opened between this world and the next. Now, like Amy Adams in Enchanted , our fairytale heroine must take a ride to reality, accompanied by Stowaway Ken (Ryan Gosling), who promptly discovers The Patriarchy, in which men (and horses) are in charge!

Ryan Gosling’s ‘deliciously vacuous’ Ken.

Meanwhile at Mattel HQ, Will Ferrell is reprising his Lego Movie role as the adult quasher of childish dreams, demanding that Barbie get “back in the box”. But by now, Barbie has met gothy teen Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), who tells her that “you’ve been making women feel bad about themselves since you were invented”, adding; “You set the feminist movement back 50 years, you fascist!” Far from saving the world, Barbie seems to have helped create a dystopia in which “men look at me like an object” and “everyone hates women!”.

There’s something of the rebellious spirit of Todd Haynes’s 1988 cult classic Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story about Gerwig’s deceptively upbeat blockbuster. Haynes’s zero-budget underground masterpiece (which has never had an official release) used increasingly disfigured Barbie dolls to tell the tragic story of a talented musician whose life was overshadowed by anorexia. Yet in Gerwig’s multiplex-friendly spectacular, this spectre of unrealisable expectation is slyly reconfigured into a weirdly liberating parable about being whatever (size, profession, attitude) you want to be – whether Ken and The Patriarchy like it or not.

There are jokes about the red pill from The Matrix , the snow globe from Citizen Kane , the male “meaning” of Coppola’s The Godfather , and fanboyish emotional overinvestment in Zack Snyder’s director’s cut of Justice League . Yet Barbie is never anything less than inclusive – meaning that young(ish) fans raised on such animated staples as Barbie in the Nutcracker and Barbie of Swan Lake will find as much to cheer about as wizened old critics looking for smart film references. Like her terrific 2019 adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women , Gerwig’s latest has no intention of ditching its source material’s core audience, even while allowing those with more snooty cinephile tastes to excuse their enjoyment of her film by comparing it with canonical works.

A smart script, co-written with Noah Baumbach , reminds us of Mattel’s constant attempts to reinvent their product (Earring Magic Ken;Palm Beach Sugar Daddy; inflatable breasts Skipper – yes, really ) and their embarrassed discontinuation of models that incurred consumer/retailer ire. It all culminates in an entertainingly feisty dismantling of male power (“He took your home; he brainwashed your friends; he wants to control the government”), pepped up by Gosling’s deliciously vacuous apex-Ken performance and carried shoulder-high by Robbie, without whom this audacious flim-flam could well have fallen flat on its face. A moving cameo by Rhea Perlman as the creator of all this madness lends a touch of heartfelt pathos. But it’s Robbie and Gerwig (along with the production designers and songwriters) who make this fizz, ensuring that everything is awesome, even when it isn’t.

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Clever, colorful comedy with sophisticated themes, script.

Barbie: Movie Poster: Barbie and Ken on a giant pink-and-white B

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Promotes idea that feminism is inclusive of all wo

Barbie is curious, empathetic, brave, and kind, an

The main Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosl

A big fight among a lot of characters involves use

Ken asks Barbie to spend the night. When she asks

One bleeped "motherf--," plus a few uses of words

Barbie and Mattel brands are in nearly every scene

The Kens have a lot of "brewskis" (beers), as well

Positive Messages

Promotes idea that feminism is inclusive of all women -- and that being a woman is complicated and sometimes messy. Barbieland is welcoming, if naive about the ways the real world works. Encourages women to support one another, to be free of the many standards thrust upon them by society. Emphasizes importance of finding out who you are separately from your relationships with other people.

Positive Role Models

Barbie is curious, empathetic, brave, and kind, and she doesn't give up on her goals. She realizes that she doesn't have to be "perfect" to have value. Ken is insecure and shallow but develops meaningfully over the course of the story. The Barbies have power (until they fall under the sway of the patriarchy), and they eventually learn how to coexist with the Kens. Gloria is an observant, loving mother, and her daughter, Sasha, is smart and bold.

Diverse Representations

The main Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) are White and conventionally attractive -- to the point where traits like flat feet and cellulite are, albeit satirically, treated as disgusting. The rest of the Barbies and Kens in Barbieland are diverse and inclusive in many ways. There are Barbies and/or Kens who are of color, have a disability (one Barbie uses a wheelchair), and represent a range of body types, backgrounds, and professions. One Barbie is played by Hari Nef, who's trans, but her identity isn't referenced in the movie. Gloria is played by Honduran American actor America Ferrera, and her daughter, Sasha, is played by Ariana Greenblatt, who's Latina. The movie was directed and co-written by female filmmaker Greta Gerwig.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Violence & Scariness

A big fight among a lot of characters involves use of silly weapons and physical grappling; another fight includes a chokehold. Barbie runs away from the Mattel executives who want to "box" her; they chase her in a scene with a lot of slapstick. There's a high-speed pursuit, but no one is injured. The Barbie cars spin out and flip over, but no one gets hurt. Ken has a fall and is taken to an ambulance/clinic for treatment. Barbie admits to having persistent thoughts about death.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Ken asks Barbie to spend the night. When she asks why, he says because they're boyfriend and girlfriend, but he doesn't know what that really entails. Barbie makes a comment about her and Ken not having genitals. A character wonders what kind of "nude blob" a Ken is "packing." Suggestive pickup lines and double entendres. After the Kens take over, several Barbies are shown flirting with and serving the Kens, often scantily clad. The primary Ken is frequently shirtless; some of the other Kens are too. Ken tries to kiss Barbie a couple of times, but she tells him no or dodges it.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

One bleeped "motherf--," plus a few uses of words including "damn," "hell," "crap," "bimbo," "tramp," "stupid," "penis," "vagina," "crazy," "nut job," "jeez," "oh my God," "for Christ's sake," "freaking," "frigging," "shut up," "up the wazoo," the suggestive euphemism "beach you off," and catcalls and double entendres.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Barbie and Mattel brands are in nearly every scene of the movie, including references to real Barbie dolls and accessories. Other featured brands include Duolingo, Hydro Flask, Hummer, Suburban, Chevy, Birkenstock, and Chanel. Clips from movies like The Godfather and Pride & Prejudice are seen.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

The Kens have a lot of "brewskis" (beers), as well as red cups, and a party scene shows the primary Ken holding what looks like a wine glass. He also mentions being "day drunk" at one point.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that writer-director Greta Gerwig 's all-star take on Barbie has a sophisticated message about feminism and the patriarchy (and, consequently, a screenplay that will likely go over younger kids' heads). The movie follows "Stereotypical Barbie" ( Margot Robbie ) and her handsome but insecure (boy)friend, Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), as they venture into the human world and discover the shocking-to-them truth that Barbie dolls didn't actually solve the problems of sexism and patriarchal control. While there's no sex in the movie (the Barbies and Kens are frank about not having genitals), Kens are shown shirtless, Barbies get catcalled, and there are suggestive references to the dolls' bodies -- including Ken's "nude bulge" -- and how a male-dominated society expects women to be ornamental and helpful. There's a bleeped use of "motherf--" (plus "crap," "shut up," "oh my God," etc.), a couple of big brawls with silly weapons, slapstick chases, beer drinking, and near-constant mentions of Barbie-maker Mattel. Characters demonstrate empathy and perseverance, and Barbieland is populated by a diverse group of Barbies and Kens from a range of body sizes, abilities, genders, and racial and ethnic backgrounds. The supporting cast includes Simu Liu , Issa Rae , America Ferrera , Will Ferrell , Emma Mackey , and Michael Cera . To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Parents say (185)
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Based on 185 parent reviews

Ruined by Political Messaging and Cheap Potshots

It’s pg-13 and i think that’s about right. but you know your child., what's the story.

BARBIE opens with a Helen Mirren -narrated 2001: A Space Odyssey homage that explains how the advent of the Barbie doll changed girls' playtime forever, allowing them to imagine unlimited futures and roles beyond motherhood. Then viewers are taken to a parallel universe called Barbieland, where myriad Barbies live in harmony with a bunch of Kens and their pals Midge and Skipper. Since Barbies rule this idealistic, inclusive land -- serving as everything from president ( Issa Rae ) and Supreme Court justices to Nobel laureates, surgeons, etc. -- they believe that the real world is similarly woman- and girl-friendly. None is more sure of that than "Stereotypical Barbie" ( Margot Robbie ), who's always perfect from head to toe, hosting nightly parties and sleepovers and occasionally paying attention to Ken ( Ryan Gosling ), who does little more than stand around at the beach with the other Kens and yearn after her. But when Barbie starts to have thoughts about death, she loses her permanent foot arch and sprouts a spot of cellulite, forcing her to visit the wise but isolated "Weird Barbie" ( Kate McKinnon ). Weird Barbie explains that Stereotypical Barbie will continue to deteriorate if she doesn't cross over into the human world, find the girl who's playing with her, and cheer her up. So Barbie and stowaway Ken set off on a quest to Los Angeles. As Barbie tries to find her human, she realizes that the human world isn't at all what she expected. Meanwhile, Ken is in awe of how much more powerful men are in the real world than they are in Barbieland.

Is It Any Good?

Greta Gerwig 's delightful comedy adventure is bolstered by Robbie and Gosling's impeccable performances, a top-notch ensemble cast, and a witty screenplay. The two stars are perfectly cast in the iconic lead roles, humanizing the doll characters and nailing both the emotional beats and the comedic aspects of Barbie's and Ken's development. The sprawling supporting cast is also well selected, with memorable performances from Rae as the Barbie president, America Ferrera as truth-telling human mom Gloria, Simu Liu as Gosling's rival Ken, and Will Ferrell as the smarmy CEO of Mattel. Three young actors from Sex Education -- Emma Mackey , Ncuti Gatwa , and Connor Swindells -- make notable appearances in supporting roles, and Academy Award-winning filmmaker/screenwriter Emerald Fennell turns up as Barbie's discontinued pregnant friend, Midge. Overall, Barbieland is a pleasingly inclusive place, where the Barbies and Kens can be more than thin, White, and blond as they sing and dance in their carefully curated outfits.

This movie isn't like the many animated Barbie movies , and its sophisticated themes may land better with teens and adults than tweens and kids. But the contrast between the movie's serious societal commentary and the trippy, nostalgic comedy manages not to feel off-putting or off-balance. Ken's explanations about the benefits of the patriarchy (horses, hats, all the top jobs!) are laugh-out-loud funny, while Gloria's passionate speech about the ways women must and mustn't act in human society rings soberingly true. For all of the jokes, there's a ton of heart in the screenplay, with Robbie and Gosling both getting many scene-stealing, moving monologues. Their memorable portrayals carry the movie, but the behind-the-scenes technicians deserve awards, too, including production designer Sarah Greenwood for the film's pink-infused Barbie-core set pieces, music supervisor George Drakoulias for the Mark Ronson-produced soundtrack, Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran for the hundreds of authentic Barbie and Ken costumes, and director of photography Rodrigo Prieto for the fizzy cinematography. An ideal mother-daughter pick and a collaborative achievement worthy of the hype, this Barbie is a keeper.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Barbie 's message: that society has sexist, contradictory, unattainable expectations for women. Do you agree? What are your thoughts about what it means to be a girl and a woman?

Discuss the way that patriarchy and feminism are explored or explained in the movie. Does Barbieland treat Kens the way women are treated in the human world? Why is Ken so delighted to return to Barbieland?

Although the movie is about a children's doll, it's not really aimed at young kids, with its mature themes and humor. Do you think a movie inspired by and about toys needs to be appropriate for little kids?

Talk about the relationship between human mom Gloria and her middle school-age daughter, Sasha. What changes about their connection once they meet Barbie?

Did you notice positive diverse representation in the movie? Why is that important?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 21, 2023
On DVD or streaming : October 17, 2023
Cast : Margot Robbie , Ryan Gosling , America Ferrera , Will Ferrell
Director : Greta Gerwig
Inclusion Information : Female directors, Female actors, Latino actors, Female writers
Studio : Warner Bros.
Genre : Comedy
Topics : Princesses, Fairies, Mermaids, and More , Friendship , Great Girl Role Models
Character Strengths : Empathy , Perseverance
Run time : 114 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : suggestive references and brief language
Awards : Academy Award , Common Sense Selection , Golden Globe
Last updated : April 24, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

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Movie Review
This Barbie is a feminist parable fighting to be great in spite of Mattel’s input

Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is often good and sometimes great, but it always feels like it’s fighting to be itself rather than the movie Warner Bros. and Mattel Films want.

By Charles Pulliam-Moore , a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.

Share this story

A smiling, blond woman standing with her arms outstretched in front of a group of girls who are facing her. The woman is wearing a cowboy hat, a neckerchief, a denim vest, and jeans — all of which are hot pink.

Barbies might “just” be toys, but Barbie™ is an impossibly perfect paragon of glamorous femininity who’s had as many specialized professions over the course of her 64-year-long existence as she has bespoke outfits. There are few pieces of corporate-owned IP that are truly as Iconic (in the pre-social media sense of the word) as the doll that put Mattel on the map and taught children of all genders — but especially little girls — to long for hot pink dreamhouses. That’s why it isn’t all that surprising to see Mattel Studio’s brand protection-minded influence splashed all over Warner Bros.’ new live-action Barbie movie from writer / director Greta Gerwig.

Valuable as the Barbie brand is, it makes all the sense in the world that Mattel would want Gerwig’s feature — a playful, surreal adventure that does double duty as a deconstruction of its namesake and her technicolor, dreamlike world — to play by a set of rules meant to protect their investments. But as well meant as Mattel’s input presumably was, Gerwig clearly came with a bold vision built around the idea of deconstructing some of the more complex realities of what Barbie represents in order to tell a truly modern, feminist story.

Watching the movie, you can often feel how Mattel and Gerwig’s plans for Barbie weren’t necessarily in sync and how those differences led to compromises being made. Thankfully, that doesn’t keep the movie from being fun. But it does make it rather hard to get lost in the fantasy of it all — especially once Barbie starts going meta to poke fun at the studios behind it in a way that seems to be becoming more common .

Along with celebrating innumerable pieces of Mattel’s history, Barbie tells the story of how the most Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) in all of Barbie Land gains the tiniest bit of self-awareness one day and starts to find her growing sense of complex personhood so alarming that she sets off for the Real World to find out what the hell is going on. Like the vast majority of Barbies who call Barbie Land home, all Stereotypical Barbie knows about her own world is based on the picture-perfect, idealized experiences she and her friends are able to breeze their ways through solely using the power of their imaginations.

Things don’t just happen to Barbies. They’re very much the arbiters of their own wills who’ve worked hard to become people like President Barbie (Issa Rae), Dr. Barbie (Hari Nef), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), and Pulitzer Prize-winning Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp). But life for Barbies also isn’t especially difficult or complicated, partially because they’re all dolls living in a plastic paradise. Mainly, though, it’s because Barbie Land’s an expressly woman-controlled utopia reminiscent of Steven Universe ’s Gem Homeworld , where neither misogyny nor the concept of a patriarchy exists because that’s not what Barbie™ is about.

As an unseen Helen Mirren — who seems to be playing a version of herself as Barbie ’s narrator — points out who’s who in the film’s opening act, you can see how Mattel’s willingness to let Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach’s script poke fun at Barbie™ led to some extremely good world-building.

Barbie Land isn’t just a predominantly pink pocket dimension where Life-Size -like dolls live in life-sized, yet still toy-like dream homes. It’s the embodiment of the easy-to-digest, corporate-approved feminism and female empowerment that Mattel and many other toy companies deal in. Only in Barbie Land, the idea of a predominantly female supreme court or construction sites full of nothing but hardworking women aren’t just dreams — they’re a regular part of everyday life. And all the Barbies are better for it because of how it reinforces their belief that they can do anything.

But outside of the Stereotypical Barbie-obsessed Ken whose job is to stand on the beach (Ryan Gosling), none of the other Kens (Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, and John Cena) are ever really given personalities to speak of. It’s clearly a purposeful decision meant to reinforce the idea that Ken dolls, which were invented after Barbie dolls, are the Eves to their Adams — accessory-like beings created to be companions rather than their own people. But as solid as the idea is, in practice, it has a way of making the Kens of color feel like thinly-written afterthoughts hovering around Gosling and like Barbie isn’t sure how to utilize its entire cast — a feeling that intensifies more and more as the movie progresses.

Long before Barbie even starts to have her existential crisis and seek guidance from Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), it becomes painfully clear that there was a strong desire on either Mattel or Warner Bros. parts for audiences to be spoon-fed as much of the film as possible before actually sitting down in theaters. If you’ve watched even a couple of Barbie ’s lengthier ads or the music video for Dua Lipa’s (who plays Mermaid Barbie) “Dance the Night,” you’ve seen a significant chunk of this film and its more memorable moments.

What you’ve seen less of is how often Barbie slows down to have characters repeat jokes and belabor points as if it doesn’t trust the audience to catch beats on their initial deliveries. Some of that can be attributed to the PG-13 movie trying to make sure that viewers of all ages are able to engage because as existentially heavy and slightly flirty as Barbie gets at times, it’s a movie about Barbies, which is obviously going to appeal to a bunch of literal children. But once Barbie’s in the real world being harassed by lascivious men, ruthless teen girls, and a bumbling, evil corporation that the movie goes to great lengths to make fun of, you also get the sense that more than a bit of the movie’s unevenness on the backend stems from Mattel putting its foot down about how it, too, needed to be a part of Barbie’s live-action, theatrical debut.

There’s a time and a place for corporations to try getting in on the fun of events like this by way of meta humor that acknowledges their own existence and the role they play in bringing projects like movies about Barbie dolls into being. But rather than creating the necessary conditions for those kinds of jokes to land, not need explanation, and add substance to Barbie, both Mattel and Warner Bros.’ self-insert jokes work more to remind you how the movie is ultimately a corporate-branded endeavor designed to move products.

That doesn’t keep Gerwig’s latest from being an enjoyable time spotlighting a decidedly inspired performance from Robbie. But it is going to make the rabid Barbie discourse even more exhausting than it already is when the feature hits theaters on July 21st.

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10 reasons the barbie movie's reviews are so great.

Barbie reviews are out, and it's one of the highest-rated movies of the year with a "fresh" 90% on Rotten Tomatoes – here are the reasons why.

Barbie hits theaters on July 21, and the movie has already received rave reviews and earned a huge Rotten Tomatoes score. The long-anticipated movie is based on the iconic doll of the same name, but Warner Bros. has taken a much more creative approach to the movie compared to other IP-driven films. Barbie is directed by Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Greta Gerwig, stars Academy Award-nominated actor Margot Robbie, and co-written by Academy Award-nominated scribe Noah Baumbach. Needless to say, the fantasy comedy movie has some serious talent and prestige behind it.

Barbie needs $300 million to break even , and even though it's being released on the same day as the hotly-anticipated new Christopher Nolan movie, Oppenheimer , box office projections indicate there's no doubt Barbie will achieve this goal. Not only has Warner Bros. cleverly marketed the movie to appeal to everyone, regardless of age, gender, or Barbie doll opinions, but the film has now also achieved glowing reviews. At the time of writing, Barbie has a shockingly high "fresh" 90% on Rotten Tomatoes , and while that's subject to change with more reviews that become available, it'll hardly drop by much. Given the mass appeal of the movie, critics have numerous reasons for loving Barbie .

10 Barbie Is One Of The Funniest Movies Of The Year

Barbie has been endlessly praised for its humor, as Christy Lemire writes, “ Barbie can be hysterically funny, with giant laugh-out-loud moments generously scattered throughout ” (via Roger Ebert ). The movie is full of comedy, fun Easter eggs, and cameos that will make audiences grin from ear to ear, with John Cena as Merman Ken ticking every one of those boxes. Barbie also nails the meta-humor that many recent comedies have been attempting ever since it was popularized in its current form by 21 Jump Street . Though a couple of reviews criticized a couple of mean-spirited jokes, for the most part, the humor lands, and not one but several critics have called it one of the funniest comedies of the year.

9 Barbie Continues Greta Gerwig's Little Women & Lady Bird Themes

When Greta Gerwig was announced as Barbie's director, it came as a surprise given that the filmmaker is best known for Academy Award-winning dramas such as Little Women and Lady Bird . However, based on the themes of those movies, Gerwig was the perfect Barbie director, and her films are led by strong female characters, which she could apply to Barbie . That's exactly what she has done, as Ross Bonaime notes, " Barbie balances the incredibly pointed specificity of the jokes and relatability of Lady Bird, with the celebration of women and the ability to show a new angle of something we thought we knew like we saw with Gerwig’s take on Little Women " (via Collider ).

8 Barbie Is Visually Stunning

Anyone who has seen the Barbie trailer can see how the crew has gone to such a painstaking effort to make Barbie so visually pleasing, even for viewers who don't like the color pink. Michael Philips writes, " Highest honors to production designer Sarah Greenwood, costume designer Jacqueline Durran and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto " (via Chicago Tribune ). The entire Barbie world, including a full-size Barbie dreamhouse, was built by a talented crew, and there was even a rumor about a shortage of pink paint due to the movie's production (via Los Angeles Times ). The costume design is equally impressive, and the wardrobe faithfully recreates iconic Barbie outfits that span decades.

7 Barbie Doesn't Feel Like An IP-Driven Cash Grab

With movies based on IP, specifically ones based on toys and board games, it's easy to churn out a low-quality cash grab, whether it's Battleship or the Transformers series. However, Barbie is anything but. Devan Coggan reveals that the movie is way more than just another one of those types of movies (via Entertainment Weekly ). The critic notes, " It’s Gerwig’s care and attention to detail that gives Barbie an actual point of view, elevating it beyond every other cynical, IP-driven cash grab ." With 2023 already having seen the release of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts and several movies based on branded products, an IP-based movie that takes some creative risks comes as a breath of fresh air.

6 Barbie Is Delightfully Unpredictable

With the meta premise of Barbie leaving her world and meeting her creators at Mattel in the real world, absolutely anything can happen in the movie. When Barbie finds out about the real world, it's unclear whether she'll decide to go back and lead an ignorantly blissful life in her own world or stay in this new reality. While a few critics have slammed the final act for being tonally uneven, it has also been praised for being wholly unpredictable. Tori Brazier calls Barbie " a summer movie so unexpected and so unpredictable that it will demand repeat viewings and future essays galore " (via Metro ).

5 Margot Robbie Is Perfectly Cast As Barbie

Margot Robbie has gotten endless praise for her performance in Barbie . Ross Bonaime's Collider review mentions, " [Robbie] has often excelled in these types of roles where we see the power a woman truly has in her environment, but there might not be a better example of that than in Barbie ." With a huge "fresh" 90%, Barbie is tied for Margot Robbie's best Rotten Tomatoes score ever , as it shares its score with I, Tonya and The Suicide Squad , and that's largely thanks to the actor's commitment to the role. Not only does Robbie physically mirror the iconic figure, but she turns a decades-old doll into a three-dimensional character that's more relevant now than ever. Not only that, but she somehow acts and moves her joints as if they're made of plastic too.

4 Ryan Gosling Is A Scene-Stealer As Ken

In addition to Robbie being showered with praise, Ryan Gosling's role as Ken has turned heads. Coggan explains, " For an actor who’s spent much of his career brooding moodily, here, he finally gets to tap into his inner Mousketeer ." Gosling is best known for his roles in Drive , Blade Runner 2049 , and The Gray Man , and he rarely ever cracks a smile in any of them. Even in romcoms like Crazy, Stupid, Love, he's remarkably stoic. However, he has 100% leaned into the campy vibes of the movie. Gosling hasn't dropped the Ken character either, as he has been embracing Ken during the press junkets with " Big Himbo Kenergy. "

3 Barbie Appeals To Both Children And Adults

Barbie was surprisingly rated PG-13 by the MPAA, meaning that anyone below 13 should be accompanied by an adult. The reason for the movie's MPAA rating is " suggestive references and brief language. " However, while there are a few sexual innuendos here and there that'll fly over children's heads, Barbie is suitable for kids . In fact, despite being a movie based on a doll originally marketed towards little girls, Barbie appeals to kids, teens, and adults. Coggan reveals, " Barbie works hard to entertain both 11-year-old girls and the parents who’ll bring them to the theater ."

2 Barbie Is A Clever & Biting Satire

Mireia Mullor is one of many critics who have been won over by Barbie 's clever satire (via Digital Spy ). The critic writes, " Life in plastic is fantastic indeed: Barbie is a sharp, hilarious and joy-contagious satire of gender roles. " Margot Robbie had one Barbie condition when signing onto the movie, which was that she wanted a diverse roster of Barbies not tied to one skin color or body type. That helped the movie become a biting satire and a social commentary on the Barbie brand. The movie certainly indulges in exactly what the movie is satirizing, such as the flashy cars, houses, and outfits, and in that respect, it oddly draws similarities to Robbie's breakthrough movie, The Wolf of Wall Street .

1 Barbie Is Much More Than A Toy Commercial

In the best way possible, Peter Bradshaw points out that the 2023 movie is an elevated toy movie (via The Guardian ). The critic writes, " This movie is perhaps a giant two-hour commercial for a product, although no more so than The Lego Movie, yet Barbie doesn’t go for the comedy jugular anywhere near as gleefully as that. " While Barbie dolls will undoubtedly fly off the shelves with the release of the new Barbie movie, that clearly wasn't the first intention of Gerwig and Robbie. The movie is a tasteful take on the iconic doll, and with its meta-jokes and satirical take on the brand, Barbie is much more like The LEGO Movie than The Emoji Movie in regard to showcasing the product.

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<i>Barbie</i> Is Very Pretty But Not Very Deep

Barbie Is Very Pretty But Not Very Deep

T he fallacy of Barbie the doll is that she’s supposed to be both the woman you want to be and your friend, a molded chunk of plastic—in a brocade evening dress, or a doctor’s outfit, or even Jane Goodall’s hyper-practical safari suit—which is also supposed to inspire affection. But when you’re a child, your future self is not a friend—she’s too amorphous for that, and a little too scary. And you may have affection, or any number of conflicted feelings, for your Barbie, but the truth is that she’s always living in the moment, her moment, while you’re trying to dream your own future into being. Her zig-zagging signals aren’t a problem—they’re the whole point. She’s always a little ahead of you, which is why some love her, others hate her, and many, many fall somewhere in the vast and complex in-between.

With Barbie the movie —starring Margot Robbie, also a producer on the film—director Greta Gerwig strives to mine the complexity of Barbie the doll, while also keeping everything clever and fun, with a hot-pink exclamation point added where necessary. There are inside jokes, riffs on Gene Kelly-style choreography, and many, many one-line zingers or extended soliloquies about modern womanhood—observations about all that’s expected of us, how exhausting it all is, how impossible it is to ever measure up. Gerwig has done a great deal of advance press about the movie, assuring us that even though it’s about a plastic toy, it’s still stuffed with lots of ideas and thought and real feelings. (She and Noah Baumbach co-wrote the script.) For months now there has been loads of online chatter about how “subversive” the movie is—how it loves Barbie but also mocks her slightly, and how it makes fun of Mattel executives even though their real-life counterparts are both bankrolling the whole enterprise and hoping to make a huge profit off it. The narrative is that Gerwig has somehow pulled off a coup, by taking Mattel’s money but using it to create real art , or at least just very smart entertainment.

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Watch Barbie with a subscription on Max, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

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Barbie is a visually dazzling comedy whose meta humor is smartly complemented by subversive storytelling.

Clever, funny, and poignant, Barbie is an entertaining movie with a great overall message.

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Bill Maher’s ‘Barbie’ Movie Review Is a Total Embarrassment

By Marlow Stern

Marlow Stern

You may have heard that Bill Maher hated the Barbie movie — an all-too-predictable outcome for a 67-year-old crank who some HBO exec thinks is “edgy” because he spends so much of his airtime railing against “wokeness.” You’d think someone whose film acting CV includes winners like Pizza Man , Tomcats , and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death would have a bit more self-awareness; then again, this is not one of Maher’s strong suits.

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OK, "Barbie": I was hoping it wouldn't be preachy, man-hating, and a #ZombieLie – alas, it was all three. What is a Zombie Lie? Something that never was true, but certain people refuse to stop saying it (tax cuts for the rich increase revenues, e.g.); OR something that USED to be… — Bill Maher (@billmaher) August 7, 2023

Well, apparently Maher can’t “read data” very well. He appears to have misread (or deliberately misinterpreted) a recent report commissioned by Deloitte and the Alliance for Board Diversity concluding that 46.5 percent of board seats in Fortune 100 companies were made up of women and minorities (not just women). Of all Fortune 500 companies, the report concluded that only 22 percent of board seats were given to women and minorities, while 78 percent of board seats in the Fortune 500 were held by white men. Women also only make up about 12 percent of the world’s billionaires, their bodies are currently being legislated against across the U.S. (and world), and, according to a Pew Research Center analysis , the gender pay gap in the U.S. has remained relatively stable over the past two decades, with “women earning an average of 82.2 percent of what men earned.” Hell, in Maher’s own arena of late-night television, there are a grand total of zero female hosts after Amber Ruffin’s Peacock show was recently downgraded to a series of specials. And, unlike the fictional realm of the Barbie movie, there’s never been a female president in the U.S.

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Maher concludes his review of sorts by saying that, despite everything he wrote, the Barbie movie “is fun, I enjoyed it — but it IS a #ZombieLie.” Look, let’s call this what it is: a 67-year-old man tweeting out an angry, hashtag-filled review of the Barbie movie to make headlines. And we haven’t even touched on the most embarrassing part of it: At one point, Maher brands the Barbie movie “so 2000-late” — a nod to a Fergie line from the Black Eyed Peas’ 2009 anthem “Boom Boom Pow” where she raps, “I’m so 3008/You so 2000 and late.” And he dropped this cringeworthy, decade-plus-old line in a screed about the Barbie movie being out of touch. I think it’s time to log off, sir.

Perhaps the first reactionary troll to publicly lose their mind over the Barbie movie was Ben Shapiro , a Hollywood nepo baby (the son of a TV exec and a composer) who has apparently harbored a grudge against the industry ever since he was rejected from a writing gig on CBS’ The Good Wife . Shapiro made a YouTube video called “Ben Shapiro DESTROYS The Barbie Movie for 43 Minutes” (caps are his) that saw him burn Barbie dolls over a barbecue and decry its “wokeness” — an embarrassing display even for him.

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Theres no blacks at the oscars but Felicity Jones at least sounds kind of black — Bill Maher (@billmaher) February 23, 2015

Then again, Maher couldn’t be a worse messenger when it comes to misogyny. He’s a sexagenarian who, when he isn’t dropping the N-word , has gleefully called women “bimbos” on his show. And, as one of Maher’s exes, Karine Steffans, who is Black, once said of him , “Bill wants someone he can put down in an argument, tell you how ghetto you are, how big your butt is and that you’re an idiot. That’s why you never see him with a white girl or an intellectual.”

No wonder he found the Barbie movie so triggering.

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Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is often good and sometimes great, but it always feels like it’s fighting to be itself rather than the movie Warner Bros. and Mattel Films want.

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