Toy Story 4

Skippable, and better than it had any right to be. Nothing about it is required: the third film closed the story, this one is an epilogue, and the main objection to it is simply that it exists.

What it found to say is narrower than the earlier films and genuinely new. Every previous entry assumed that a toy's purpose is to belong to a child. This one puts that assumption in front of two characters who have each stopped believing it. Bo Peep has spent years unowned, working, and is perfectly happy; Woody cannot imagine himself as anything but somebody's property. The film is about whether a life organised entirely around being needed by one person is a life.

Forky is the device that makes it work. A toy made out of rubbish by a four-year-old, who knows he is rubbish and keeps trying to climb back into a bin, is a funny idea and also a direct challenge to the series' own rules about what makes a thing a toy and who decides.

The ending is the problem, and it is a real one. It separates the group permanently and gives Woody a resolution that many viewers read as a contradiction of what the third film had already settled. If that bothers you, stopping after Toy Story 3 is entirely defensible. The antique shop sequences and Gabby Gabby are the best material here, and Keanu Reeves as a Canadian stuntman toy is the funniest thing in the series.