The review embargo broke for this week’s Barbie and Oppenheimer of “Barbenheimer” fame, and now we can see if the hype for either or both is justified. Turns out the answer is yes, for each movie.

At the time of this writing, both Barbie and Oppenheimer have close to identical critic scores, both quite high, making the double feature even more worthwhile, given that one isn’t likely to be dramatically worse than the other.

Barbie currently has an 88% from 175 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, Oppenheimer has a 92% from 154 critics. They are, of course, polar opposites in tone and subject matter, but similar in quality, it seems. Here are some of the Barbie reviews:

And some of the Oppenheimer ones:

The repeated statement that Oppenheimer is Christopher Nolan’s best film is going to be catnip to his already extremely devoted fanbase, given his history of beloved hits from The Dark Knight to Interstellar to Inception to Dunkirk. And Greta Gerwig’s Barbie, perhaps almost a greater gamble, cements her position as a stellar director who can make meaningful projects out of anything, including a Mattel-produced toy.

These two films also join Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1, which released the previous week to even higher scores, a 96% from critics and a 94% from audiences, so there are close to no bad blockbuster options in theaters right now. It feels like both a full recovery from the pandemic and also at least some sort of shift away from the underperforming, underwhelming glut of Marvel and DC superhero movies as of late (with perhaps a Guardians of the Galaxy 3 exception).

So, you can’t go wrong with either it seems. We’ll see how the box office results turn out here, but it seems that with broader audience appeal and a non-three hour runtime, Barbie is going to win that category without question.

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