Moving Image: BARBIE

Moving Image screenings start again in mid-January with what should certainly be a crowd-pleaser: Barbie. This is not just a film for plastic doll aficionados! It starts on a high with a very clever parody of Kubrick’s 2001 opening scene, but it’s definitely not downhill after that. It is indeed very pink, but it’s also funny and clever, with tremendous performances from Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling. Set in colourful Barbie Land, stereotypical Barbie lives a perfect life every single day until one day, she shows signs of being…a human. She decides to go to the Real World to find the cure in order to make herself perfect again. “a riotously entertaining candy-coloured feminist fable that manages simultaneously to celebrate, satirise and deconstruct its happy-plastic subject.” (Mark Kermode)