TOY STORY 4 (U) Five stars

How do you improve on the perfection of Toy Story 3, which bade a moving farewell to Woody the cowboy (voiced by Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the other denizens of Andy’s childhood?

Oscar-winning computer animation studio Disney Pixar comes tantalisingly close with a belated rip-roaring fourth instalment that will have parents dabbing at their eyes with almost as many sodden handkerchiefs as its predecessors.

Admittedly, popular characters including Jessie (Joan Cusack) and Rex (Wallace Shawn) are largely sidelined by a freewheeling plot that borrows heavily from past glories. Director Josh Cooley’s hare-brained rescue mission was always going to disappoint after the note-perfect resolution to the third film.

What this glorious episode might surrender in originality it compensates for with visual artistry, uproarious verbal sparring and deep sentiment.

The fractious central relationship between Woody and Buzz, which stretches back almost 25 cinema-going years, reaches a gorgeous, heart-rending crescendo that closes this toy box of wonders with a soft and satisfying emotional thud.

Woody, Buzz and the gang are now the property of a little girl called Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw), who is nervously preparing for kindergarten orientation.

The tearful tyke overcomes her nerves by creating Forky (Tony Hale) from discarded arts and crafts supplies.

The repurposed plastic utensil becomes Bonnie’s security blanket during a family road trip to Grand Basin, which lights the touch paper on more than one existential crisis.

“I am not a toy!” rages Forky. “I’m a spork. I was made for soup, salad, maybe chilli ... and the trash.”

When Forky falls into the clutches of sinister doll Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks) and her army of ventriloquist dummies, Woody co-ordinates a daring rescue.

He is reunited with Bo Peep (Annie Potts) and her three-headed porcelain sheep Billy, Goat and Gruff, and makes a new ally in self-doubting motorcycle stuntman Duke Caboom (Keanu Reeves).

Meanwhile, Buzz stalls for time by delaying the departure of Bonnie and her parents (Lori Alan, Jay Hernandez) from Grand Basin.

“We could frame Dad for a crime so he goes to jail,” suggests stuffed white unicorn Buttercup (Jeff Garlin).

Toy Story 4 opens with a lustrous flashback set during a torrential downpour that epitomises the immaculate attention to detail in every frame of animation.

Vocal performances complement the technical excellence and Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele are shameless scene-stealers as megalomaniacal fairground prizes, whose hysterical solution to an unwanted human incursion is a well-timed “plush rush”.

The script quietly preaches the beauty of imperfection between breathlessly staged action set-pieces and a barrage of visual gags, which demand a second viewing.

BRIGHTBURN (15) Three stars

A spaceship carrying an extraterrestrial newborn crash-lands in rural America and a kindly couple adopts the infant.

The otherworldly boy matures and unlocks incredible powers of speed and strength, taking to the sky in a homemade costume with a red cape billowing in his slipstream. If that adopted child was a refugee from planet Krypton, director David Yarovesky might be rebooting the Superman franchise, which has rarely soared since Christopher Reeve swaggered in spandex.

Instead, Brightburn gleefully corrupts a familiar origin story and anoints the gravity-defying protagonist not as mankind’s greatest hope, but as the most terrifying threat to our existence. Named after a fictional town in Kansas where the destruction unfolds, Yarovesky’s picture puts a sinister, gore-soaked twist on the Man Of Steel, engineering a series of grisly deaths as the adopted son learns how “special” he is and deciphers a transmission from his fallen spacecraft: “Take the world.”

A misery-saturated script penned by Brian Gunn and Mark Gunn, brothers of Guardians Of The Galaxy director James Gunn, mines a rich vein of dark, subversive humour but their narrative drilling is hit and miss. The sibling screenwriters leave the barn door ajar for sequels. Back in Kansas, Kyle Breyer (David Denman) and wife Tori (Elizabeth Banks) try unsuccessfully for a child until the universe answers their prayers with a falling meteorite. Inside is a baby boy and the Breyers tell family including Tori’s sister Merilee (Meredith Hagner) and her husband Noah (Matt Jones) that they have adopted a child.

When Brandon (Jackson A Dunn) reaches his awkward high school years, spaceship wreckage hidden in the barn emits an ominous red glow and the hormone-addled teenager exhibits violent mood swings.

While Tori dismisses speculation linking Brandon to the monstrosities, Kyle pleads with his wife to remove her rose-tinted spectacles. Brightburn boasts plenty of splatter as Brandon goes on the rampage, including one dislocated jaw and a wince-inducing close-up of a shard of glass in a blinking eye.

The tone is uneven - a tug-of-war between parody and slasher pulls hardest in favour of the latter - and characterisation is thin, leaving Dunn to stare eerily into the camera to prickle our fear. When all else fails, Yarovesky resorts to conventional and not-so-super jump scares.

CHILD’S PLAY (15) Two stars

Released in 1988, director Tom Holland’s slasher horror Child’s Play brought to life a demented doll, which goes on a bloodthirsty rampage after a serial killer transfers his tormented soul into the benign plaything. The popularity of murderous mannequin Chucky sparked various sequels and a vast line of merchandise.

Lars Klevberg directs a remake of the original film with a few significant plot alterations. Widowed mother Karen Barclay (Audrey Plaza) relocates to a new city with her deaf 13-year-old son Andy (Gabriel Bateman).

The move is especially hard on Andy, who makes a few friends at school including Omar (Marlon Kazadi), Falyn (Beatrice Kitsos), Chris (Anantjot S Aneja) and Pugg (Ty Consiglio). Soon afterwards, Karen purchases Buddi (voiced by Mark Hamill), a cute doll which connects all the Kaslan Corp appliances in the family’s home.

Andy christens the new arrival Chucky.

A technical defect transforms the plaything into a knife-wielding harbinger of doom, who leaves death and destruction in his wake. So it is left to Andy and his schoolfriends to end Chucky’s reign of terror