Justin Chang

At one point, Lily, pretending to be Bonnie, arranges for all her old toys to be boxed up and stored in the garage.

And so it's up to Jesse to save the day, with some help from Buzz, and eventually Woody, happily cutting his retirement short.

Bonnie's toys wind up at another kid's house in the area, where they meet a bunch of lower-tech devices, none funnier than Smarty Pants, an electronic toy designed to help kids with toilet training.

He's voiced by Conan O'Brien, gamely spouting more potty jokes than you could find in the past four Toy Story movies combined.

It's here, though, that the story starts to go a little soft.

After confronting the ways in which tech is taking over our lives, Toy Story 5 pulls back and suggests that devices and toys can coexist, and that devices themselves are no less susceptible to being neglected, forgotten, and tossed aside for the fancy new models.

Maybe it's in the nature of Pixar movies to reassure us, to delve deeper into feelings of grief and impermanence than studio animated films typically do, but then offer us consolation in return.

Toy Story 5 may look boldly forward, but it also peers lovingly backward.

One funny subplot features an army of digitally souped-up Buzz Lightyear action figures, a callback to the sight gag in Toy Story 2 when Buzz encountered multiple versions of himself on a store shelf.

And although much has been made of the new Taylor Swift tune on the soundtrack, the most memorable musical bit here is a gentle refrain of Randy Newman's song, When She Loved Me, also from Toy Story 2, which told the heartbreaking story of Jessie's separation from Emily, her original owner.

Stanton beautifully revisits and deepens that story here, reminding us that loss is a part of life, and that we are never truly forgotten by those we love.

Shame?

Is it really good?

In 2019, a photo posted on the message board 4chan gave rise to the creepy concept of the backrooms, an endless maze of what appeared to be abandoned corporate offices with beige carpets, yellow walls, and fluorescent lights.

The idea of being doomed to wander this mundane liminal space proved popular enough to inspire a horror meme and a web series directed by a teenager named Kane Parsons.

Now Parsons is 20, and his new Backrooms feature is the number one movie at the box office.

With more than $80 million so far, it's already made back its budget and then some.

It's an elegantly disorienting movie, with a number of riddles that, at least initially, it wisely avoids answering.

It's set in 1990 in the suburbs of Santa Clara Valley, California.

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Clark, a middle-aged alcoholic with a failing furniture store business.