Barbie receives rapturous first reviews – live news

The Independent’s Barbie review has just gone live and boy is our critic Clarisse Loughrey a fan.

In her five-star review, Loughrey calls Gerwig’s picture “one of the most inventive, immaculately crafted and surprising mainstream films in recent memory – a testament to what can be achieved within even the deepest bowels of capitalism”.

“Barbie is joyous from minute to minute to minute. But it’s where the film ends up that really cements the near-miraculousness of Gerwig’s achievement,” Loughrey teases.

Read the full review here:

Cillian Murphy said it “took a toll” to play J Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan’s new film about the physicist who co-created the first atomic bomb.

The Irish actor, 47, added that the “moral dilemmas and paradoxes” his character grapples with throughout the film are “huge”.

“It does take a toll, but in a brilliant way, it was the biggest, most exhilarating challenge,” Murphy said, ahead of Oppenheimer’s release.

The film recounts the famous physicists’ fears that tests for the first atomic bomb could have destroyed the planet.

Claire Allfree dives into the actors’ strike in this week’s edition of State of the Arts.

“Creative economies are complex beasts, particularly in the live entertainment sector,” she writes. “Even so, it’s increasingly the case that the stars of the show are rarely the ones reaping the rewards, while the foot soldiers are barely managing to survive.”

Speaking in a new interview with The Telegraph, Nolan revealed that when his daughter, Flora, 22, visited the set with his wife, the producer Emma Thomas, it struck him that he could cast her as a nameless young woman whose flesh is flayed from her face in a nuclear explosion, in a sequence that happens within Oppenheimer’s mind.

Flora is credited on IMDb as “Burn Victim” for her work on the film.

If you know Margot Robbie then you know how much of a fan the Australian actor is of Love Island.

The Barbie star is a self-obsessed fanatic of the ITV dating show – so much so that season five contestant Chris Taylor found his way into her movie.

Taylor confirmed in an interview at the Barbie premiere in London that he has a small, speaking part in the picture.

Christopher Nolan isn’t known for quick afternoon flicks and Oppenheimer is no different, clocking in with a runtime of three hours exactly.

Great Gerwig’s Barbie, meanwhile, is a more manageable hour and 54 minutes long.

Oppenheimer features a significant subplot involving the nuclear scientist’s relationship with psychiatrist and physician Jean Tatlock, played by Florence Pugh.

In a recent report, it was claimed that the film’s lead Cillian Murphy and Pugh have scenes of “prolonged full nudity” together, and that it makes Oppenheimer one of Nolan’s rare films to include a significant interest in sex and relationships.

“You know the Chicago (Disco Demolition) thing, where everyone burned their disco records, Saturday Night Fever had reached its apex and the poor Bee Gees were like, ‘All we wanted to do was make people dance! What did we do wrong?’ That’s Barbie,” Ronson told The Associated Press.

“I’ve never really executive produced something before,” he said. “I love this film. We had an amazing partner in Atlantic Records.”

“And then doing the score, but it was a lot of learning on the job. It was still a job that I’ve never really done before. … It’s fun to show people different scenes and getting them to dream big.”