For Fans of Margot Robbie

Most sports biopics flatten their subject into a rooting interest. I, Tonya does the opposite: it keeps Tonya Harding perpetually out of reach, unreliable, culpable, and sympathetic all at once. Robbie plays her not as a victim or a villain but as someone the system was always going to chew up, and the film is honest enough to let Harding herself complicate that reading. The mockumentary framing should be a gimmick; here it becomes the whole argument about media, class, and who gets to tell their own story.

Plenty of IP blockbusters try to have it both ways: fun on the surface, slightly subversive underneath. Barbie actually delivers. Greta Gerwig and Robbie built a film that can sell pink merchandise and land a genuinely cutting critique of gendered expectation in the same sequence. The Robbie performance is doing something specific and hard: playing an archetype becoming a person, which requires projecting blankness and interiority simultaneously. The film's global box-office success did not dilute what it was saying.

Robbie co-founded LuckyChap Entertainment in 2014 and has since produced I, Tonya, Birds of Prey, Promising Young Woman, and Barbie, among others. This is not a vanity credit. The company has a specific taste: female-driven, formally adventurous, commercially ambitious without sacrificing the edge. Understanding LuckyChap explains why Robbie's career has a through-line that most actors at her profile level lack. She is operating as a producer-star in the mold of a very short list.

Babylon was a commercial disappointment and a critical split. It is also Damien Chazelle's most nakedly emotional film and Robbie's most physically committed performance. She plays Nellie LaRoy with the force of someone who knows their shelf life is being measured in months. The film's chaos is the point: it recreates the orgiastic excess of late-silent Hollywood and then holds you in the rubble. Revisit it with that frame and the final sequence lands differently.