Synopsis
Barbie and Ken are having the time of their lives in the seemingly perfect world of Barbie Land, until they get a chance to go to the real world, where they soon discover the joys and perils of living among humans.
The Review
Gerwig threads an impossible needle here, a studio toy tentpole that's also a genuinely pointed piece of satire about the expectations placed on women, and mostly gets away with it. The production design is a candy-colored triumph, every set piece feels handmade rather than rendered. Ryan Gosling's Ken steals the back half of the film so completely that the movie occasionally seems to forget its own protagonist, but that's a minor complaint against a film this willing to be strange, sincere, and genuinely funny within a two-hundred-million-dollar budget.