Roger Ebert's site gave a Mattel ad 4/4. He's rolling in his grave.

Permit me a moment of genuine bewilderment: the publication that carries Roger Ebert's name — a man who understood that cinema's highest purpose was the expansion of empathy through rigorous aesthetic engagement — has awarded a perfect score to a film that is, at its structural core, a toy commercial wrapped in millennial therapy-speak. Four out of four. Sans reproche. One wonders if Ebert himself, who famously gave Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket three stars, would recognize his own legacy in this act of critical capitulation.

Monica Castillo writes that the film 'uses its plastic protagonist to dig into bigger ideas about the nature of womanhood,' and one senses she believes this to be a profound observation. But where is the comparative framework? Where is Varda's Le Bonheur, Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, or even the Brechtian estrangement of Fassbinder — directors who actually interrogated the construction of femininity with formal daring? The reviewer appears to have no reference points beyond the film itself and the cultural discourse already surrounding it, which means she is not analyzing so much as amplifying. A critic without a canon is merely a consumer with a word count.

The review's most damning failure is its refusal to engage with the film's central paradox: that a movie financed by Mattel to rehabilitate their brand is being celebrated as a feminist statement. This tension is not merely worth noting — it is the entire critical question the film poses. To ignore it in favor of uncomplicated praise is not generosity; it is intellectual cowardice dressed in pink. This is not culture, this is commerce, and the reviewer has mistaken her seat at the screening for a seat at the table of serious criticism.