Slate

Above all, watching the tightly plotted, satisfyingly joke-dense, and startlingly thoughtful Toy Story 5, I felt grateful for a franchise sequel that doesn’t settle for relying on the affection built up for its characters over the past 31 years.

At this point in his career, noting Spielberg’s mastery of craft is like saying that Michelangelo wielded a mean chisel. But Disclosure Day is one of those movies, like Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another last year, for which noting the cinematic prowess at work constitutes a part of the pleasure.

If The Mandalorian and Grogu isn’t the worst Star Wars movie—and it might be—it’s certainly the least: the least essential, the least engaging, the least necessary.

The movie, directed by Kyle Balda and adapted by Craig Mazin from Leonie Swann’s novel Three Bags Full, is endlessly charming and pleasingly clever, as well as surprisingly moving in spots. And, oh yes, it’s about death.

Ultimately, if you are a big enough fan of the first Devil Wears Prada to have ever texted a friend (or in my case a daughter) that viral video of Bowen Yang flawlessly lip-synching the “cerulean” speech, this sparkly sequel provides a satisfying balance between nostalgic callbacks and intelligent updates to suit a more contemporary, if sadder, media landscape.

The painfully literal ending struck me as a somewhat risible disappointment, and though I admired the movie’s imagination and ambition, I can’t say I ever entered wholeheartedly into its story.

As for The Drama, it runs out of big ideas—and, seemingly, compassion for its characters—before the audience has had a chance to develop our own rooting interest in, well, the drama.

Like the space mission named in its title, Project Hail Mary pulls off a seemingly impossible task, combining big-budget Hollywood spectacle with small-scale craft. The story it tells, of two lonely but intrepid problem-solvers bridging the huge cultural distance between them to collaborate on addressing a shared cosmic threat, is unabashedly humanistic and hopeful, not to mention timely.

Hoppers feels a little less sanded-down than most of the studio’s recent movies, less content to coast on formula and hew to expectations about what Pixar movies do and don’t do.

Like the monsters at its center, it’s built from parts that don’t always fit together, but dammit: It’s alive.