As much as the pre-release marketing made it clear that Barbie's aesthetic would be pretty different from that of Lady Bird and Little Women, those two previous films of Greta Gerwig's were both so flat-out stunning that I was more than willing to follow her here.
So - it's an entertaining film, the gender politics are basically good, the way it reckons with capitalism less right-on, and those two (gender/capitalism) aren't wholly separable when it comes to Barbie/Mattel. What that means for how you score the quality and success of the film probably depends a bit on one's starting point (as a mainstream blockbuster with impressively subversive elements, or as the latest offering from an indie 'auteur' that's compromised by its corporate connection), and how much of a handicap one allows given the need for the actual Mattel to in some sense approve the film's release.
All up I think it's a pretty impressive achievement - it speeds by without ever obviously getting tangled up amidst its many different elements, and pretty much creates its own emotional and imaginative reality (and therefore stakes), although I did reflect afterwards that while the Barbies are clearly characterised as having agency, their actual subjectivity - and interiority - was fuzzy, making the film a bit less emotionally engaging than it might otherwise have bee.
(w/ R)
