Dazzling and deliriously, no other 2023 movie attempted the same levels of extraordinary excess as Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. The writer-director’s two previous films, Lady Bird and Little Women, were distinctly different masterpieces, which still didn’t properly forecast how audacious her approach would be when taking on an iconic plaything that rouses strong responses on all sides of sexual-politics skirmishes. In what should be a lesson to other filmmakers, Gerwig doesn’t shrink from the passionate positions. She charges into the midst of them all and entwines herself in them like undulating tendrils of cotton candy. As the movie’s blaring promotions promised, Gerwig made a movie that was an equally suitable gift for Barbie’s adherents and haters, even if the movie is ultimately designed to win over the latter group or at least chip away at their churlishness. If the film’s explorations of feminism and toxic masculinity remain largely at an introductory level, that doesn’t exactly diminish the giddy subversion of openly addressing those themes in a big, shiny blockbuster comedy. What finally sends Barbie into the stratosphere is the way it expresses Gerwig’s boundless love of movies and all the possibilities they hold. The vibrant art direction and costume design, the various homages to cinematic predecessors (most notably the opening nod to 2001: A Space Odyssey), the latitude given to her absurdly gifted cast (led by the astonishing Margot Robbie) to take big chomping bites of the comedic and emotional moments both, and the joyful blast of the Kens’ dream ballet all contribute to Gerwig’s thrilling thesis that there are no real limits to the magic that be conjured on the big screen. Barbie is a saturnalia of imagination by a filmmaker whose instincts to this point have been unerring.