Barbie (Greta Gerwig, 2023)

Margot Robbie in Barbie

Cast: Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling, America Ferrera, Ariana Greenblatt, Rhea Perlman, Helen Mirren (voice), Will Ferrell, Michael Cera, Connor Swindells, Issa Rae, Kate McKinnon, Alexandra Shipp, Emma Mackey, Simu Liu, Kingsley Ben-Adir, Ncuti Gatwa, Scott Evans, John Cena, Dua Lipa. Screenplay: Greta Gerwig, Noah Baumbach. Cinematography: Rodrigo Prieto. Production design: Sarah Greenwood. Film editing: Nick Houy. Music: Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt.

For all the snarky cleverness of its screenplay, the brightness of its performances, and the liveliness of its direction, what is Barbie if not a 114-minute image ad for Mattel, Inc.? The movie allows the toymaker to look like a good sport by acknowledging its oft-criticized influence on young girls and its marketing mistakes, and by letting its management be portrayed as clueless males, with its CEO played by the master of cluelessness, Will Ferrell, while still raking in more money than ever. It's a masterpiece of corporate self-justification. The points the movie makes about the Barbie phenomenon (which became an even bigger phenomenon when its release date coincided with another blockbuster, resulting in the "Barbenheimer" meme), couldn't have been made without the participation of Mattel. Sure, you could make a movie satirizing the toy business, focusing on a girl doll laden with separately purchased accessory toys. You could call the doll something like Mitzi and give her a boyfriend called Bob, and you could call the company Rattel or Battel, and you could score all the same points with almost the same script and the same cast. But it wouldn't have the same sharply real edge. This is a movie that future analysts of American society in the 21st century are going to come back to when they examine childhood and capitalism and the role of the sexes in the year 2023. The story the movie tells is essentially the same as that of another toy that comes to life, Pinocchio. Except that when Pinocchio became a real boy, I'm pretty sure that he ran out to play. If Ken had been the one to become real, he probably would go out to shoot hoops or see his mates at the bar. When Barbie becomes a real woman, the first thing she does is visit a gynecologist. It's an ending that sums up the film's view of what it means to be a woman today.  

Z for Zachariah (Craig Zobel, 2015)

Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine in Z for Zachariah

Cast: Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Chris Pine. Screenplay: Nissar Modi, based on a novel by Robert C. O'Brien. Cinematography: Tim Orr. Production design: Matthew Munn. Film editing: Jane Rizzo. Music: Heather McIntosh.

Z for Zachariah is based on a young adult novel, but it's a movie for grownups who know how to savor its treatment of race, religion, sex, secrets, and lies, and moreover who aren't troubled by its failure to provide solutions to all the problems it crams into a microcosm. When I say "based on" I mean that literally: I haven't read the novel on which it's based, but the Wikipedia summary suggests that screenwriter Nissar Modi took only the premise of that book -- surviving a nuclear holocaust in a kind of new Eden -- and crafted something very different, adding a third character and changing the race of one. I have the feeling that if the film had been made by an "art house" director like Kelly Reichardt, for example, or a French director like Olivier Assayas, and with actors that cause no stir at the box office, unlike the beautiful and starry Margot Robbie, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Chris Pine, it would have made more of a sensation among critics than the middling 79% "fresh" rating it gets at Rotten Tomatoes. Because it's a mostly low-key drama simmering with sexual and racial tension. Its ending leaves closure up to the viewer, as the best films do. And despite the cast seeming a little too rich for the film's blood -- they do look a little too well-groomed and well-fed for survivors of the apocalypse, as several critics noted -- the performances are top-notch.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie, Emile Hirsch, Margaret Qualley, Timothy Olyphant, Julia Butters, Austin Butler, Dakota Fanning, Bruce Dern, Mike Moh, Luke Perry, Damian Lewis, Al Pacino, Nicholas Hammond, Samantha Robinson, Rafal Zawierucha, Lorenza Izzo, Costa Ronin, Kurt Russell. Screenplay: Quentin Tarantino. Cinematography: Robert Richardson. Production design: Barbara Ling. Film editing: Fred Raskin.

With Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino proves himself to be perhaps the most superficial of our major filmmakers. I mean that as a compliment, recalling Oscar Wilde's remark, "All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril." Tarantino exerts a lot of effort getting things right so he can get them wrong. He meticulously re-creates the Hollywood of the late 1960s just so he can change history. And so, Sharon Tate is not murdered by the Manson family. Instead, Tex and Squeaky and Sadie are done in by the fictional Cliff Booth, Francesca Capucci, and Rick Dalton, the last incinerating Squeaky with a flamethrower -- perhaps the only "Chekhov's flamethrower" in the history of movies, its existence and Dalton's prowess with it having been established earlier in the film. Tarantino did this kind of rewriting history before, in Inglourious Basterds (2009), but without the kind of luxuriating in upending our knowledge of things the way he does here. Like almost all of his other films, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a revenge fantasy, though here the revenge is the audience's: We get our gratification from revenge upon actuality, from seeing Sharon Tate spared a horrible death. But despite the violent outcome, this is also one of Tarantino's least violent films as well as one of his least flamboyant (perhaps owing to the absence of his signature actor, Samuel L. Jackson). It comes off eventually as a kind of homage to one of the film and TV industry's least honored periods: that late-'60s era, before the emergence of film brats like Coppola and Spielberg and Scorsese gave a new direction to movies, a macho time filled with spaghetti Westerns, James Bond ripoffs like the "Matt Helm" series, and private eye shows like "Mannix," when fading stars like Rick Dalton were scrounging for whatever work they could land. Tarantino himself was a small child then, so his re-creation of the period is, like most of his oeuvre, drawn more from movies than from memory. Still, he knows how to create characters and write dialogue, and how to cast actors who can play and speak both. It won a well-deserved supporting actor Oscar for Brad Pitt, whose role seems to me at least as large as that of Leonardo DiCaprio, who was nominated as best actor but didn't win. 

I, Tonya (Craig Gillespie, 2017)

Margot Robbie in I, Tonya

Tonya Harding: Margot Robbie
Jeff Gillooly: Sebastian Stan
LaVona Harding: Allison Janney
Diane Rawlinson: Julianne Nicholson
Shawn: Paul Walter Hauser
Martin Maddox: Bobby Cannavale
Dody Teachman: Bojana Novakovic
Nancy Kerrigan: Caitlin Carver

Director: Craig Gillespie
Screenplay: Steven Rogers
Cinematography: Nicolas Karakatsanis
Production design: Jade Healy
Film editing: Tatiana S. Riegel
Music: Peter Nashel

The girly-girl character of women's figure skating has always been something of the sport's mainstay, attracting little girls with dreams of becoming ice princesses into what can be a brutal business. I think that one of the failings of I, Tonya is that it doesn't deal sharply enough with this aspect of the sport: the training and marketing. Sure, it glances at it severely, but because the film is made from the point of view of Tonya Harding, the blue-collar interloper into a mostly affluent suburban world, we don't get enough of the Nancy Kerrigan side of it: the girl shoved through adolescence into womanhood by the Big Sports machine. On the other hand, that would be another film entirely, and one that still needs to be made. So we should be grateful for what we get: an often witty and entertaining movie with some star performances by Margot Robbie and Allison Janney.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013)

Leonardo DiCaprio has replaced Robert De Niro as Martin Scorsese's go-to leading man, but he has yet to make his Raging Bull (1980) or Taxi Driver (1976), which many people -- including me -- think of as the peak achievements of both Scorsese and De Niro. The Wolf of Wall Street comes close to being DiCaprio's GoodFellas (1990). Both movies are based on true stories that illuminate the dark side of American experience: In the case of GoodFellas, the mob, and for Wolf, the unholy pursuit of wealth in the stock market. Both are in large part black comedies, full of sex and drugs, and both end in an inevitable downfall. And both have been criticized for excessively glamorizing the lifestyles of their protagonists. Terence Winter's adaptation of the memoir of Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort (DiCaprio) spares no excess in depicting a life corrupted by unchecked greed, and yet neither Winter nor Scorsese seems able to put the course of Belfort's corruption into plausible shape, the way Scorsese and screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi made Henry Hill's rise and fall plausible in GoodFellas. It's a flamboyant film, with entertaining and sometimes frightening performances by DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Margot Robbie, Matthew McConaughey, Jon Bernthal, and Jean Dujardin, but the film often seems to be carried away with its own determination to get away with as much outrageous behavior and language as possible. I would have welcomed a little less Jordan Belfort and a little more Patrick Denham (Kyle Chandler), who was based on Gregory Coleman, the FBI agent who finally managed to bring Belfort down. But as in GoodFellas, the emphasis is less on the law than on the disorder.