BARBIE

Let’s start the year in full pink with Greta Gerwig’s hit Barbie! This is the opening instalment of a retrospective running through early 2026.

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Writer-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.

– Mark Kermode (The Observer)