Has there ever been a greater trilogy' The Godfather, monumental as its first two installments are, peters out in Part III. Same with Alien and Terminator. Back to the Future and Indiana Jones more or less land the plane, but the follow-ups never hit the heights of the originals. Richard Linklater's Before trilogy and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy are masterpieces start to finish, but they lack the operatic scale and mainstream appeal of, say, Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Those latter two franchises both have a credible claim to the title, but the glut of subpar sequels and spin-offs has diluted their magic. For my money, none of them measures up to Toy Story. Is this an entirely neutral and clear-eyed assessment' Well, let's just say that as a child I owned no fewer than nine Buzz Lightyear action figures. This much, though, is beyond dispute: Financially, culturally, artistically'by any metric, really'the original Toy Story trilogy is a triumph. The first movie, released in 1995, practically invented computer animation and became the first animated film to earn a Best Screenplay nomination at the Oscars. The next two installments, out in 1999 and 2010, were just as good. Each ranked among the three highest-grossing films worldwide in the year of its release; Toy Story 3 was the first animated feature to crack $1 billion at the box office. They were successful in part because the films appeal to both children and adults. They are about friendship and existential angst. They combine the prelinguistic appeal of bright colors and physical comedy with a peppering of allusions to Jurassic Park, The Shining, The Wizard of Oz, and innumerable other classics. Taken as a whole, the trilogy captures what it's like to grow up in all of childhood's ambivalent complexity....

What if you took a folk figure or a popular comic-book character'someone beloved enough to be the star of, say, a Disney cartoon'and made a film that cast them in a dark, even antiheroic light' Call it the 'grim and gritty' take, or perhaps the 'untold true story'; it's the kind of reimagining that has befallen several storybook figures on-screen, such as Peter Pan and Hansel and Gretel. The saga of Robin Hood, the British outlaw, is particularly popular, and has been told many times over at this point. He has been a swashbuckling do-gooder from Hollywood's Golden Age, as well as a cute animated fox. But of late, cinema has tried to cast a shadow over the man, not one of those depictions murkier than the director Michael Sarnoski's The Death of Robin Hood. This new rendition stars Hugh Jackman, who is no stranger to roughening up an established protagonist. He most famously played the X-Men character Wolverine as a fading but bloodthirsty old cowboy in Logan, the acclaimed comic-book adaptation. The Death of Robin Hood is based on the English ballad Robin Hood's Death, a poetic Middle English telling of the bandit's final days. But whereas the original tale is romantic and melancholic, Sarnoski's take has a much harder edge'so much so that I was genuinely aghast at the brutal, blunt violence of its first act. This is not a film striving to make Robin Hood a more complex figure. It first presents him starkly as an amoral villain, almost monstrous, then challenges the audience to accept that such a creature could be worthy of any redemption....

'Where shall we look for Washington, the greatest among men,' asked Parson Weems in 1800, 'but in America'that greatest Continent, which, rising from beneath the frozen pole, stretches far and wide to the south'' Weems, Washington's first biographer, was a propagandist of genius'but even he might not have known quite how American he was being when he wrote that line. A smaller country, it is implied'geographically smaller, and smaller in soul'simply could not have handled the monster-truck greatness of this man. It would have ruptured or burst. For greatness like this, only America would have been big enough. Weems's Washington is famously great all the way through, great from the get-go: an angelic child, fanned by the warm wings of 'ministering spirits,' who matures irreversibly into a mighty warrior and then a world-shaking leader. But what if greatness is something you grow into, patchily and vexedly, under pressure' Young Washington, a new biopic, gives us pre-Revolutionary George, early-20s George, pale, petulant, virginal, ramrod-straight, and bristling with awkwardness and ambition. He is callow, unformed. Imperfect, in a word. And when he starts soldiering, he makes some rather large mistakes....

In the fall of 1929, the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation, then the most successful film company in America, seemed poised to buy Warner Brothers Pictures Inc. The latter was smaller and newer, but it had already become a lucrative commodity, having recently bought Vitagraph, an even tinier studio that operated cutting-edge sound technology. But in October came the stock-market crash, and with it a world of potential complication; among other hurdles, the executives involved were left waiting around for the Federal Trade Commission to approve the deal. 'The merger is definitely off,' Albert Warner, a co-founder of Warner Bros., said at the time, 'and will not be resumed again.' Almost a century later, the companies now known as Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery are engaged in yet another potential merger. But unlike in the 1920s, when consolidations swept Hollywood during a boom in production, the companies today appear to be treating the move as something of a last resort'a consequence of an uncertain decade marked by the coronavirus pandemic, multiple industry strikes, a drop in casual theatergoing, and the looming threat of AI. The business is 'collapsing,' Jonathan Kuntz, a film historian, told me. 'The classic Hollywood model of making high-quality feature films that show around the world in movie houses'that model is definitely in a decline.'...