Barbie

In Barbie Land, a bright, wall-less world of Dreamhouses, beach days and nightly parties, Stereotypical Barbie (Margot Robbie) lives a flawless routine next to a whole society of Barbies who run everything. Ken (Ryan Gosling) hangs around the edges, and his whole sense of self depends on getting Barbie's attention.

Then Barbie's perfect days start to glitch, and she has thoughts that don't belong in a doll's world. To fix things she has to travel into the real world, with Ken tagging along. There she runs into a mother, Gloria (America Ferrera), her cynical teenage daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt), and the executives of Mattel.

Greta Gerwig directs the film as a musical-tinged satire of gender roles, identity and what society expects from people. It mixes big nostalgic spectacle with a surprisingly personal look at what it means to be a woman, and a person, in the 21st century.

Gerwig uses a toy that carries decades of cultural baggage to look at womanhood in the 21st century: the contradictory standards women face, the flip side of those pressures as seen in Ken, and the freedom of choosing an imperfect, mortal, self-defined life over being a perfect idea.

The film's main claim is that no one should be reduced to a role. That applies to Barbie as an ideal, to Ken as an accessory, and to Gloria as a worn-out mother. Real identity starts when you accept messiness, change and an ending.

Feminist manifesto vs. corporate product: Some viewers read the film as a sincere feminist critique. Others see it as clever Mattel marketing that absorbs criticism of Barbie in order to sell more Barbie.

Barbie opened the same weekend as Oppenheimer, which set off the 'Barbenheimer' phenomenon: crowds showed up in pink or black for back-to-back screenings. It grossed more than $1.4 billion, the biggest result in Warner Bros.' history.

It earned 8 Oscar nominations and won Best Original Song for 'What Was I Made For?'. The awards season also became part of the film's story. When Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig were left out of the Best Actress and Best Director categories while Ryan Gosling was nominated, many people online said the Academy had just acted out the film's plot.

Gloria's monologue became one of the most widely quoted film speeches of the decade, and 'I'm Just Ken' turned into a viral pop moment of its own, including Gosling's performance at the Oscars.

Audiences and critics praised the film's inventive production design, its humor, Ryan Gosling's scene-stealing Ken, Margot Robbie's performance and America Ferrera's monologue, which many women said made them feel seen. The mix of nostalgia and social commentary was often singled out.

Criticism came from several directions. Some found the feminist message too blunt and too explained. Others questioned whether a Mattel-backed film could really critique Mattel. Some commentators on the right rejected its politics outright.

The Oscar snubs of Robbie and Gerwig became a flashpoint of their own. Overall, the film was a huge commercial and critical success and a defining event of the 2023 cultural moment.