In 2026, it’s hard out here for a toy — whether you’re an action figure or a dinosaur or a horse or even a plastic fork — what with all the screens sucking all the attention out of kids. And it’s that real-world dilemma that Toy Story 5 tackles with both wit and wisdom.

Juggling slapstick humour, political critique, trigger-happy action and surreal tangents, Dead Souls does not always hang together comfortably. Cox has made better films, but this offbeat frontier fable is still a charmingly eccentric, mischievous late-career effort with an impressively strong authorial voice.

Spielberg’s West Side Story demonstrated that the old master still has exciting work in him when he chooses to tackle a genre that’s new to him. But like Ready Player One and The Fabelmans before it, Disclosure Day reveals an artist spinning his wheels when he digs back into his own past triumphs.

While the film delivers a fair share of laughs, its barrage of references to recent hit movies calls to mind Pauline Kael’s dismissal of Mel Brooks’ High Anxiety: “This is a child’s idea of satire — imitations, with a funny hat and a leer.”

With connective tissue linking it to both Skinamarink and Synecdoche, New York, Backrooms is a chillingly ambitious debut that finds the terror in enclosed spaces and echoing silences. It’s a screen nightmare that could easily work its way into viewers’ real ones.

Emmanuel Marre’s A Man of His Time uncovers the banality of evil at the very heart of the Vichy government, among the morally-lacking under-secretaries of Marshal Pétain’s cabinet.

For Favreau, philosophy and world-building is obviously the stuff of the TV show; now that it’s a movie, it’s time for fun and thrills.

What one remembers most from All of a Sudden is the uniqueness of the women’s relationship and their shining embrace of human rights — not just emotionally, but with their minds.

If the film works at all it is thanks to the exceptional craftsmanship of its camerawork, editing, and acting, under the direction of Asghar Farhadi.

Minor quibbles aside, Pawlikowski has delivered a gorgeous poem of a film, a mournful meditation on national identity, private and public tragedy, the dangers of trying to remain apolitical in deeply political times, and the enduring cultural riches that can offer small but crucial solace in apocalyptic times.

Balagov‘s latest outing is a warm, colour-saturated and sporadically magical and comical family drama set in a tightly-knit community in Newark, but with tension and trauma looming ever close on its seemingly happy-go-lucky protagonists.

Low-key but spanning a symphony of disturbing themes from personal relations and wildlife conservation to the threat of war, Koji Fukada’s ‘Nagi Notes’ offers a fascinating, multi-faceted perspective on insular Japan today.

Is God Is shrewdly combines its genre thrills — it’s a violent road trip of murder and revenge — with arthouse aesthetics and thought-provoking writing, which gives Aleshea Harris a career path that’s as hard to predict as Racine and Anaia’s literal one. But I can’t wait to see what she does next.

Urban has never been funnier, and he makes Johnny’s character arc from cynical Hollywood burnout to a champion capable of self-sacrifice a believable one. Not that many people are buying to tickets to Mortal Kombat II for the character arcs, granted, but Urban’s performance is a delightfully unexpected pleasure in a movie that winds up being full of them.

The first movie, for all its fluff, gave Miranda that eminently quotable “cerulean sweater” monologue, but this follow-up has nothing as interesting to say about fashion, or journalism, or life as anyone leads it. It’s sending nostalgia down the runway and expecting us to wear it, when the perfectly comfortable original already fits just right.

Maybe the center of the drama is the obsession — love? passion? — Mathias has with Claude, and their rendezvous plays out in a rather melodramatic way. But the music imposes its presence. Strangely enough, Claude does not seem interested in music or the pianist´s career. And the film limits itself to offering a compromise in this impossible love.

Movies about artists, ideally, celebrate the art while also providing a glimpse into the blood, sweat, and tears behind its creation, but any exciting moments here can be found in their original, natural state on YouTube. Michael has no ambitions beyond being its own commemorative souvenir booklet.

While sitting through its interminable 133 minutes, I found myself parsing the difference between the unsettling and the merely unpleasant, and between the grotesque and the icky. In both cases, the former requires some engagement with human experience and consciousness while the latter — where this film permanently resides — merely relies upon witless bad taste and simple-minded gross-outs.

You, Me & Tuscany has all the heft of a squash blossom, and it’s similarly tasty without being filling. But sometimes, you just want one anyway.

Let’s give The Super Mario Galaxy Movie this: for a piece of intellectual-property exploitation, it’s created with far more craft and care than it had to be, with dazzlingly colorful backgrounds and action that’s constantly moving forward. At the same time, it never stops to explain the rules of the characters and their interactions for those of us not steeped in four decades of gameplay.

It’s a meaty premise, one that its talented cast digs into heartily, and the film succeeds at generating tensely uncomfortable comedy for most of its running time.

This update brings nothing particularly new to the table of the writer-director’s work.

The film’s best moments are an outlandish pleasure, far outshining the highlights of the similarly-plotted and mostly by-the-numbers sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. But the latter at least maintains a consistent level of energy from start to finish. The initial dynamism on display in They Will Kill You contracts and collapses. Death be not dull.

Tear-jerkers are valuable to cinema; they can provide emotional catharsis as satisfying as any other kind of popcorn entertainment. It’s hard to get misty-eyed, however, over a film that never stops reassuring you that everyone’s going to get a happy ending. Let the audience feel bad for a while, so they can feel good after; failing that leaves everyone feeling nothing.

Ultimately, the film’s breezy attitude and calculated audience-pleasing wins out. Project Hail Mary offers plenty of laughs alongside of a dollop of sentiment, and it centers science in a tale where the apocalypse isn’t necessarily inevitable; it celebrates both humanity’s ability to save itself, and the idea that humanity might be worth saving.

Veers off in so many exhausting directions that it ultimately amounts to little more than sound and fury. She’s alive, alive, but she can’t maintain this pace.

Hoppers tells an effective story with wit and ingenuity, not to mention distinctive character design for every corner of the animal kingdom, from a kind-hearted shark (Vanessa Bayer) to a bratty caterpillar (Dave Franco).

The Scream series has become a horror version of That’s Entertainment!, where 21st century fans of a 1990s movie that paid homage to 1980s horror can get the kind of squishy, splattery, shocking homicides that A24 just isn’t going to deliver.