Pixar has now made three movies explicitly about toys, yet the best movie depiction of how toys express human experience remains Whit Stillman’s 1990 Metropolitan. As class-conscious Tom Townsend (Edward Clements) tries fitting in with East Side debutantes, he discovers his toy cowboy pistol in his estranged father’s trash. Without specifying the model, Stillman evokes past childhood, lost innocence and Townsend’s longing for even imagined potency. But Toy Story 3 is so besotted with brand names and product-placement that it stops being about the innocent pleasures of imagination—the usefulness of toys—and strictly celebrates consumerism.

Ballerinas figure prominently in Kanye West’s half-hour film “Runaway,” and are among its many symbols of the agony and beauty of artistic struggle. But in Black Swan, one ballerina, Nina Sayers (played by Natalie Portman), becomes director Darren Aronofsky’s mechanism for a ridiculous psychological thriller that is genuinely less thrilling and revealing than West’s magical mystery movie.