“Superstar” begins as a droll prank and then tilts, almost imperceptibly, into surreal domestic nightmare and, finally, authentic tragedy. (“As we investigate the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death we are presented with an extremely graphic picture of the internal experience of contemporary femininity.”) In staging and filming his doll-house mise en scène, Haynes (who co-wrote “Superstar” with Cynthia Schneider) borrows tropes from horror flicks and disease-of-the-week movies and interpolates advertisements and product labels (notably, for Ex-Lax and ipecac, the poisons that kept Karen thin), contemporary news footage, faux talking heads, and grad-seminar intertitles. We see Karen and Richard onstage, in the studio, and at the White House, performing their smooth-as-syrup hits, and at home with their harridan stage mother, Agnes, and passive father, Harold. Made in the summer of 1985, when Haynes was attending Bard College, in New York, “Superstar” situates its plastic actors on miniature, hand-painted sets. “Mattel doesn’t really recognize that as a part of her career, and she did a really terrific job.” “Barbie’s performance has been really acclaimed by fans across the country,” Haynes told Newsday, in 1990. More than three decades ago, the young filmmaker Todd Haynes directed an all-Barbie cast in his short feature “Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story,” which tracked the wholesome contralto’s Nixon-era rise to fame alongside her brother Richard and her subsequent descent into anorexia, which killed her at the age of thirty-two. But, to a certain slice of the Gen X cognoscenti, “the Barbie movie” will always and forever refer to a very different film, one both notorious and barely seen. It is a relief (if not a surprise, given Gerwig’s track record) that “Barbie” is also witty and inventive, a good rosé sparkling amid the usual summer-blockbuster sludge. The months-long publicity blitz and box-office triumph of “Barbie”-which earned a hundred and fifty-five million dollars on its opening weekend, giving the director Greta Gerwig and the nascent Mattel Films the biggest début of 2023-has been a dazzling confetti blast of media total war, as inevitable as a bright-pink Abrams tank.

Superstar sonic youth rym