It’s easy to question the necessity of another "Toy Story" movie, especially after the emotionally devastating "Toy Story 3." Arriving nine years later, "Toy Story 4" has to earn its relevance. It does so in spades, with astonishingly beautiful animation, smart humor and a story filled with the kind of pathos and poignancy we expect.

Aubrey Plaza was haunted by Chucky long before she ever toyed with joining the new "Child's Play" movie. The slasher film series about an evil killer doll left an impression on the actress at a young age, and now she's at the center of the franchise's latest flick -- a modernized retelling of the 1988 original in which Chucky is now a high-tech robot who learns from humans rather than a toy possessed by an evil spirit.

Commentary

As musical epithets go, it’s hard to say whether "dad rock" is more insulting to the dads or the rock. It’s a term that’s been flung at everyone from Pavement to the Eagles, and it’s most often used to describe a multigenerational swath of rock ’n’ roll that no longer feels angry enough at the world to want to change it. Or if not that, maybe it’s just mature rock music made by and for chill, white dads.

When he took up the mantle of Harlem detective John Shaft for the 2000 action reboot "Shaft," Samuel L. Jackson knew his character, John Shaft II, would need a persona of his own.

Kumail Nanjiani is the best thing about "Men in Black: International." That’s saying something, considering that the actor never appears on camera and that the character he lends his expressively plaintive voice to is a CGI alien the size of a gerbil.

"Dark Phoenix" isn’t kidding about the "dark" part. The latest, and probably final, chapter in the X-Men superhero saga is a somber, even funereal affair -- not in a stylish, Christopher Nolan-esque way, or even a la "Logan," the deliciously cynical comic-book-noir contribution to the mutant canon from 2017.

The key to the appeal of "The Secret Life of Pets" is the filmmakers understand the lovable quirks and characteristics that make our furry friends who they are. In the sequel to the animated hit, "The Secret Life of Pets 2," it’s more of the same, but with babies and toddlers thrown into the mix. If you’ve seen the first movie, you get it.

Tom King, who writes DC Comics’ flagship Batman series and other titles, hopes his work will help people understand the experiences of a generation that has spent much of their lives fighting terrorism overseas.

"Rocketman" is the first big-screen adaptation of the life and music of singer-songwriter Sir Elton John. The film, now in theaters, was executive produced by ... Sir Elton John.

The trailer for the upcoming installment of the Rambo series is set over a slowed-down rendition of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road.”

Julianna Margulies knew her role in the National Geographic limited-series "The Hot Zone" would give her a multitude of layers to play. She could concentrate on the medical part of the character bringing to the screen the doctor who, in 1989, recognized the first appearance of the deadly Ebola virus on U.S. soil. There were also the elements of her character being in the military while being a wife and a mother.

Growing up in England, Naomi Scott, like so many other young girls, fell in love at an early age with Disney’s animated heroines - particularly Mulan, Pocahontas and Jasmine from "Aladdin." But while those three are officially part of Disney’s juggernaut princess line of media franchises and toys, alongside the likes of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Ariel, it wasn’t their ostensible princess-y trappings that enthralled Scott. It was something deeper.

In a Kansas farmhouse, a young couple is engaged in romantic intimacy when the woman feels the earth move. It’s the tremors from an alien spaceship (not a spoiler, it’s in the synopsis), which has deposited a humanoid baby nearby. The woman (Elizabeth Banks) has struggled with fertility problems and takes it as a sign from heaven, so she keeps it and raises it as her own.

If more than three-quarter of a million disgruntled "Game of Thrones" fans had their way, dragons would unmercifully torch the eighth season of the HBO hit, screaming an endless stream of firestorm upon the story line of the show’s final episodes.

At this point, the words "John" and "Wick" used together signify something very specific. Mostly: sharply choreographed, creatively efficient violence. We know there will be a brooding Keanu Reeves killing dozens (only because he has to). There will be eye-popping stunts and a network of sharply dressed assassins. There will be gun fu. Does "John Wick: Chapter Three - Parabellum" break the formula? It most certainly does not. Director Chad Stahelski wouldn’t dare. But you almost wish he would.

Engaging critically with Dog Movies can be a challenge for a critic. Who wants to be the crank who scoffs that the heartwarming animal movie is just too contrived and sentimental? But it can be hard to avoid, with the sickly sweet pandering pabulum of recent films like "A Dog’s Purpose" and "Dog Days." Fortunately, "A Dog’s Journey," the second film adapted from W. Bruce Cameron’s novels and a follow-up to "A Dog’s Purpose," offers up an interesting, complex story into which we can sink our teeth.

It’s an open secret in publishing that young-adult fiction has gone viral because card-carrying adults as well as younger folks are drawn to the genre’s purity of emotions and directness of action. In the cinematic universe, the "Twilight" and "Hunger Games" franchises have benefited from that phenomenon, and now the sweet-natured but potent "The Sun Is Also a Star" is poised to join the list.

The first sample that the Chemical Brothers locked down when building their new record, "No Geography," made its way into the present from the far end of a long-disconnected telephone line.

Q&A

Ryan Reynolds once envisioned himself, best-case scenario, as Wilson on “Home Improvement” or Mr. Furley on “Three’s Company.” “When I started in this business, my highest goal was to be the wacky neighbor on a sitcom,” Reynolds says. “It took a much different path.” Against his own expectations, Reynolds has emerged as one of Hollywood’s top movie stars, thanks in large part to the runaway success of his two “Deadpool” movies, R-rated wise-cracking films that seemed to unlock Reynolds’ own powers of motor-mouthed sarcasm.

Nearly a half-century after making her bones in "The Godfather," Diane Keaton is playing a cheerleader. In her latest movie, "Poms," the 73-year-old Keaton, who won hearts -- and an Oscar -- wearing ties and a fedora in "Annie Hall," dons a short skirt as Martha, a woman who moves to a retirement community as a means of facing her own mortality.

A Pakistani waiter working in a small cafe in the city of Rawalpindi says he knew nothing about the TV series “Game of Thrones” — or its antihero character played by U.S. actor Peter Dinklage.

ANALYSIS

A "Game of Thrones" fan and a military history scholar breaks down the mistakes in the epic onscreen battle. The gist? Good television; terrible military tactics.

High fantasy in film and TV is having a moment. Take the premise of the brutal home invasion thriller "The Intruder." A creative director at a San Francisco advertising agency and a journalist who writes about social justice issues for women’s magazines have a cool $3 million-plus to drop on a palatial dream home in Napa Valley. It’s a stretch to suspend your disbelief that far, but buying the property does have a catch: The former owner just can’t seem to say goodbye. Swap the H in HGTV for "horror" and you’ve got "The Intruder."

"UglyDolls" begins in a place called Uglyville, where an outcast citizenry of misshapen and otherwise substandard dolls has been exiled, cut off from the love of children because of their perceived imperfections. And who cannot relate?

The universe belongs to Marvel. “Avengers: Endgame” shattered the record for biggest opening weekend with an estimated $350 million in ticket sales domestically and $1.2 billion globally, reaching a new pinnacle in the blockbuster era that the comic-book studio has come to dominate.

If there’s a single phrase that sums up the guiding principle of the Marvel Cinematic Universe -- the interdependent series of superhero movies that, with the arrival of this week’s "Avengers: Endgame," now numbers 22 films -- it’s this: Hold that thought. (Truth be told, with "Endgame’s" running time of three hours, "hold that bladder" would also apply.)

Thirteen summers ago, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was asked during a relatively small Comic-Con panel whether he could ever see his company’s characters interacting on screen. "Who knows?" Feige teased. "This is a big new experiment for Marvel. But it’s no coincidence that we have the rights to Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Cap" -- and right then, before he could finish, he was interrupted by the volume of audience glee and hopeful extrapolation. Fan imaginations leaped ahead at the possibilities.

Near the time of the 75th anniversary of the June 6 D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, the film will return to more than 600 theaters in the U.S.

Commentary

Television has become such a wildly diverse, densely populated planet that asking "What should I watch?" is like asking "Where should I go on vacation?" But ask, "What is the best show ever?' and the answer is easy: "Game of Thrones."

It’s taken Linda Cardellini almost a quarter of a century, but she’s finally returned to the genre that helped launch her professional acting career. The initial starring role on television for the star of “The Curse of La Llorona” was in the series “Bone Chillers.” There’s no way the projects could be any different, as the TV show dealt with high school students battling a wide array of monsters, while her new feature film is based on a well-known Latin American legend.

In the growing faith-based film industry, movies based on the true stories of medical miracles are ideal film fodder. They’re more accessible to mainstream audiences than Biblical tales or conservative-baiting political fiction, and in pitting faith against medical science, they present seemingly hard proof of the existence of God -- or whatever mystical forces of the universe one might believe in.

Actress Lily Collins believes in fate. Although she doesn’t exactly put it that way, she says when she was just starting out at 16, she made a vow. “I decided to make the conscious decision that when I’m told ‘no,’ it’s ‘No, not right now,’ ” she says.

In a time and place where blacks and whites rarely cooperate, a Ku Klux Klan leader agrees to help lead public meetings on the subject of possible school desegregation. The process transforms his life -- and, by the way, everyone else’s -- in "The Best of Enemies." Yes, this is another semi-historical civil rights drama about a white guy.

It’s nearly lunchtime on a Friday in downtown Manhattan, but Ruth Wilson is just sitting down to breakfast. Her meals are all out of whack because she’s starring every night in a 3 ½-hour production of “King Lear.” Wilson, who plays doomed Cordelia and the Fool in “Lear,” has also depicted a psychopathic genius in the BBC’s “Luther,” a woman clouded by grief in Showtime’s “The Affair,” a 19th-century governess who falls for her brooding master in the BBC’s “Jane Eyre,” and a submissive wife torn between her brutish husband and neurotic sister in a London production of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Yet none of these intense, enigmatic roles prepared the actress for her trickiest job: portraying her grandmother, Alison, in “Mrs. Wilson.”

Tim Burton gave his live-action remake of “Dumbo” a more contemporary feel, but the film’s stars say the director kept the simple essence and elegance of the 1941 Disney ‘toon intact.

Tawanda “Tee” Marie Hanible's first book draws on her experiences growing up in the foster care system, serving as a Marine gunnery sergeant and founding the nonprofit Operation Heroes Connect.

"Us," Jordan Peele’s eagerly anticipated follow-up to his smash hit "Get Out," can’t help but be compared to that earlier movie. As a politically minded genre exercise combining horror and humor, it’s utterly of a piece with Peele’s obvious fascination with cinematic grammar at its most ritualized and predictable, and what happens when you give it a swift kick in the social conscience.

With terrorist attacks and mass shootings occurring regularly, it can be all too easy to forget or blur the details of some of the most dramatic, recent violent attacks. There’s a sense of history being preserved and archived through the mediated lens of fiction filmmaking in Anthony Maras’ "Hotel Mumbai." Maras makes his directorial debut with the gripping, nearly minute-by-minute account of the carnage that unfolded in the grand Taj Mahal Palace Hotel in Mumbai during the terror attacks of November 2008. It’s a meticulous depiction of the events that is at once disturbing, yet also illuminating.

Perhaps it’s a post-"Inside Out" phenomenon that animated films aimed at children need to tackle complex emotions or psychology, translating it into terms kids can understand. This is the case with "Wonder Park," a film that is part "Roller Coaster Tycoon," part lesson on grappling with the fear of losing a parent. It’s a complicated dynamic where both storylines seem deeply at odds with each other. The wonders of Wonder Park are dampened by the pall of grief that the protagonist is experiencing, while the wacky amusement park antics prevent the story from going especially deep.

With mislaid alliances and stealthy maneuvering, the Keira Knightley vehicle "The Aftermath," about an English woman’s affair with the German man whose home she’s occupying in post-war Hamburg, truly is a film that embodies the phrase "the war at home." But though it purports to be pleasurable, with taboo trysts unfolding in a palatial estate, this adaptation of Rhidian Brook’s novel feels overly staid, often ridiculous, and can’t bring the heat.

There’s cosmic significance in "Captain Marvel" -- the first female-led installment of the seemingly endless Marvel Studios Avengers franchise -- opening on International Women’s Day. As a story of a woman overcoming her own self-doubt and the forces that control her to discover latent powers that can literally save the world, it is just the kind of feminist myth we need when our male leaders seem so feckless and overcompensating.

Army Sgt. 1st Class Phillip Kennedy Johnson, writer of “The Last Sons of America,” also plays the trumpet in the U.S. Army Field Band.

Here are a few military-themed entertainment options that are scheduled to come our way.

In the aftermath of the massacre at the Route 91 Harvest festival in October 2017, country star Jason Aldean -- who was performing when the gunman started shooting -- vividly remembers when he first started to emotionally recover from the horrific tragedy.

The steely gaze of Na’vi warrioress Neytiri welcomes visitors at the entrance to some of Hollywood’s most fantastical worlds. Towering in the corner of a hangar, an "Aliens" xenomorph menaces, frozen in place. Upstairs sits the Heart of the Ocean, daring passersby to never let go. No, you’re not in Kansas anymore. You’re at Lightstorm Entertainment, the solar-powered, eco-friendly Manhattan Beach headquarters of Oscar-winning "Avatar" filmmakers James Cameron and Jon Landau.

The comic actress Rebel Wilson makes any movie better -- and frequently steals the show. She did it in "Pitch Perfect," among many other films in which she plays the second lead, with a combination of oddball line readings, out-of-left-field reactions and inspired slapstick. Finally, we can celebrate her elevation to the star (and co-producer) of "Isn’t It Romantic," a visually and verbally ingenious sendup of romantic comedies that wears its candy heart on its sleeve.

The 2017 thriller "Happy Death Day" took a "Groundhog Day"-like concept -- a young woman must relive the same day, over and over -- and put it in service of a largely uninspired college-set horror movie. (Turns out the day in question is the day of the protagonist’s murder, which she must re-experience until she solves the crime.) But unlike the 1993 Bill Murray comedy, some people never learn from their mistakes, no matter how often they repeat them.

Will Arnett’s secret to making Batman so funny in the "Lego" movies is he’s not trying to be funny. He’s playing the animated version of the comic book hero with the same seriousness as Michael Keaton or Christian Bale.

Creepy children are a mainstay of the horror genre. Going back to "The Bad Seed" and beyond, children have proved capable of unnerving audiences with a combination of precocious dialogue and psychopathic behavior. The chilling new horror film "The Prodigy" continues that fine tradition, with one intriguing complication: in the hands of director Nicholas McCarthy and screenwriter Jeff Buhler, the young villain is a metaphor for parental failure.

It’s not often that directors get a second crack at their own work. But Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland has undertaken the task of remaking his own 2014 revenge thriller, "In Order of Disappearance," for American audiences, now titled "Cold Pursuit." With Moland behind the wheel, he can ensure the preservation of the film’s dance of tone, which is bone-dry, ice-black, darkly violent and laugh-out-loud funny.

There’s something so wonderfully ironic about a black woman taking over the sequel to a Mel Gibson vehicle. The effervescent Taraji P. Henson stars in "What Men Want," the gender-flipped reboot of "What Women Want," the 2000 Nancy Meyers film starring Gibson as a playboy who can hear the inner monologues of women after a freak accident. But director Adam Shankman is no Nancy Meyers.

This year’s advertising Super Bowl had, again, lots of celebrities and lots of dogs.

Hollywood director Rob Reiner drew a crowd of reporters on his first visit to Japan in more than three decades to promote his Iraq War journalism film “Shock and Awe.”

Sub-zero temperatures. Blistering 40-mile-per-hour winds. Snow as far as the eye can see. These are only a few of the unsparing conditions actor Mads Mikkelsen had to overcome over the course of 19 days filming in Iceland for his new survival movie, "Arctic," about a pilot stranded in a snow-covered wilderness after his small plane crashes.

It was around this time seven years ago that Gina Rodriguez was deemed the "It" girl out of the Sundance Film Festival with her role as a struggling East L.A. rapper in the hip-hop drama "Filly Brown." Maybe it was naivete, but she had hoped the attention would bring the same sort of career boost it had brought other young ingenues, such as Carey Mulligan or Jennifer Lawrence.

Do the Middle Ages hold the key to saving the world? "The Kid Who Would Be King" suggests so. This contemporary, Arthurian-themed adventure encourages kids of today to look to the legends of the past -- and to the lessons of medieval chivalry -- in their search for a peaceful future.

Spike Lee watched the Oscar nominations Tuesday morning on television from his bed, with his wife, Tonya, his two grown children, Satchel and Jackson, and their dog, Ginger. Screaming ensued. Lee landed his first directing Academy Award nomination for “BlacKkKlansman,” his comic and furious send-up of white supremacism.

In "The Sixth Sense," just before uttering the now-famous "I see dead people" line, young Cole (Haley Joel Osment) interrupts a badly improvised story by Bruce Willis’ Dr. Crowe. "You haven’t told bedtime stories before," Cole says. "You have to add some twists and stuff." Right from the beginning of his meteoric-rise-to-crash-to-reborn career, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan was winking at his audience about what would become a defining penchant: the twist ending.

Not everyone loves going to work, so it’s only fair that actors will sometimes sour on the characters they portray. That’s the case right now for Penn Badgley, who has been on the receiving end of a flood of amorous messages from thirsty fans of his Lifetime show "You" imploring him to "kidnap me, pls."

Kevin Hart’s transition from brattily charming comic persona to serious dramatic cinematic presence isn’t going quite as planned. His extracurricular controversies notwithstanding, the comedian’s first turn in a more serious role in "The Upside" -- a remake of the award-winning French hit "The Intouchables," across from Bryan Cranston and Nicole Kidman -- should have been a slam dunk. And yet, "The Upside" is missing some critical elements, and it’s a struggle to find the bright side to this rather hackneyed film.

With the proliferation of dog movies in the past couple of years, it’s no surprise that the astonishing animal journey film would soon resurface. "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" and the "Homeward Bound" movies were wildly popular family movies in the 1980s and ’90s, and now joining the canon is "A Dog’s Way Home."

In "Bird Box," Sandra Bullock leads two children, all blindfolded because of a mysterious danger, on a journey to safety. The movie, which received mixed reviews, became an inexplicable well for memes over the holidays. Netflix announced that 45 million people had viewed it on the platform in the first seven days since its release. And then, just as Bullock became known as "the lady from 'Bird Box'" in a bunch of memes, doing things on camera while blindfolded for laughs has become the "Bird Box" challenge.

"Will (Ferrell) and I joke that we single-handedly ruined Paul Thomas Anderson's producing career before it started," Adam McKay says, casually splaying his 6-foot-5 frame across the couch, as though in a weekly therapy session.

David Le’aupepe was looking for salvation. Instead, he found rock stardom. With his tight black jeans, black button-down, wild mane of curly black hair, unkempt beard, armful of tattoos and silver nose ring, the 26-year-old looked every bit the rock star during a recent interview. But his is a strange origin story.

"I don’t think this lighting is going to work," Jennifer Lopez says. She has just turned up at a photo shoot, and she is dismayed. "Newspapers don’t do retouching," the actress points out, "and ugly don’t sell movies." Best friend Leah Remini stands by patiently. The two will be posing together in a photograph for a story about to their new film, "Second Act," but Remini seems less concerned about the images.

Peter Ramsey knows how closely the entertainment industry is following the movie he just co-directed. After all, that film, the animated "Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse," is supposed to blow the doors off the end-of-year-box-office, save a major studio and also rocket mature animation and superhero film categories into a new future. You know, minor goals.