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Turns out, Pixar’s sentient toys can still make us cry: Nearly 25 years after their cinematic debut, the sweetly selfless plastic pals return in a fourth Toy Story, one charged by the animated series’ thematic essence of finding purpose in being useful to others. It’s a hopeful, immensely human chapter that echoes the franchise’s complex notions of loyalty, displacement and self-worth, doing so with humor and warmth. Working from a script by Andrew Stanton and Stephany Folsom (as well as six other story contributors, including ousted ex-Pixar chief John Lasseter), director Josh Cooley successfully balances all of these elements—a noteworthy achievement considering the large cowboy boots he had to fill after the epic yet nuanced Toy Story 3, one of Pixar’s more perfect achievements. The reliable company of old friends certainly helps: Now happily living with a new kid, Bonnie (voiced by Madeleine McGraw), Tom Hanks’s pull-string pardner Woody, Tim Allen’s devoted Buzz Lightyear, Joan Cusack’s feisty Jesse and the rest of the gang are back. New to the clan is Forky (Veep’s Tony Hale, adding nervy personality and genuine weirdness), an existentially confused spork with low self-esteem that the ever-imaginative Bonnie creates as a kindergarten craft project. Convinced of his status as trash (an unusually raw class dilemma for a Pixar movie), Forky get a crash course on his toyness from Woody, himself thrown by a life crisis resembling that of a retiree. Bonnie has moved on to o

Nobody wanted this one: a reboot of a series that now feels more redundant with every galaxy-guarding wisecrack coming from the theater next door. But how fun was it back in 1997, when CGI-heavy sci-fi first collided with salt-and-pepper buddy comedy? After three films, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are now AWOL—probably wisely on their part—leaving the dark suits and memory-wiping neuralyzers to Tessa Thompson and Chris Hemsworth, who may bring to mind their superior Thor: Ragnarok (which you probably saw and swiftly forgot about some lazy afternoon). They have little to do in a film that’s both whirlingly busy and stubbornly listless and uninspired. It won’t exactly make you hate movies, full stop, but Men in Black: International imposes such a generic dullness, it will have you seriously examining your entertainment choices. For a character that’s meant to be born and raised in Brooklyn, Thompson’s Molly, an often naïve trainee agent, represents a missed opportunity for toughness—or at least the endearing street smarts that this series used to supply on the regular. Meanwhile, if you ever wondered when Hemsworth’s surfer-bro charm would curdle into swagger, it’s now: As Molly’s new partner, Agent K, Hemsworth is almost shockingly unfunny. When, only 15 minutes in, you’re hearing boss Emma Thompson complain about their secret organization’s gendered name (“I’ve had the conversation,” she fumes), you have no idea you’re experiencing the film’s only funny line. She dispatch

First, the good news: Dark Phoenix is a fairly watchable addition to a franchise that has felt stretched to breaking point. It boasts visual sass, the set pieces are mostly fun and the acting stands up as well as you’d expect with a charismatic cast well-grooved in the X-universe. In Sophie Turner’s Jean Grey and Jennifer Lawrence’s Raven, it has two nuanced female characters front and center—three, if you count Jessica Chastain’s ethereal alien-type creature Vuk, which is something that still can’t be said for too many superhero movies. It’s not nearly as good as Logan or X2, but it’s a whole lot better than the eyeball-poking affliction that was 2016’s X-Men: Apocalypse. On the flipside, it still feels like a fairly pointless retread of comis creators Chris Claremont and John Byrne’s Dark Phoenix Saga, which we’ve already seen (and hated) in Brett Ratner’s 2006 disaster X-Men: The Last Stand. It bolts on a pallid alien invasion storyline that’s more X-Files than X-Men and is laden with lumpen dialogue about destiny and “controlling your inner power” that could have been lifted wholesale from a tai chi manual. Throw in a long delay of the release date and there’s the inescapable feeling of a franchise half-heartedly winding down before the inevitable reboot kicks in, with Disney (and the might of Marvel Studios) replacing 20th Century Fox at the wheel and meshing the mutants into its superhero pantheon. Dark Phoenix introduces the serving X-Men as a kind of global 911 serv

Twenty-seven years after the release of the animated classic, Aladdin gets the live-action treatment, with Sherlock Holmes director Guy Ritchie at the helm. The well-known plot is the stuff of Disney magic: a rags-to-riches tale in which a common thief wins the heart of a princess with the help of a magic lamp that transforms him into a prince. If today's Aladdin is not quite a scene-for-scene remake, it’s pretty close. The plot is tweaked with some sensible improvements: Agrabah, a mythical Silk Road city, was once described in the original opening song as “barbaric.” It’s now simply chaotic, with a bustling population of people from as far as northern Europe (look out for Billy Magnussen’s hilarious Prince Anders) to China, and everywhere in between. It’s clear that this version of Aladdin celebrates the cultures from which the Arabian Nights folk tale emerged—a sensitivity no doubt learned (better late than never) from Black Panther, which provided an alternative to the typical white-savior motif. Canadian-Egyptian actor Mena Massoud perfectly captures Aladdin’s street-smart charm, while British-Gujarati actress Naomi Scott gives a fire-cracker performance as Princess Jasmine, showing she’s less concerned with finding a husband than learning the required skills to succeed her father (Navid Negahban) to the throne. Marwan Kenzari’s Jafar verges on pantomine villainy, but there’s no denying that he cuts a menacing figure. Best of all, the film is a proudly out-and-out mus