‘Cars 2’: Pixar’s Worst Movie Yet?

Has Pixar lost its Midas touch? The studio’s latest, Cars 2, isn’t winning critics over: The film is “notably lacking in soul or sublimity,” A.O. Scott writes in The New York Times. The movie elevates the sidekick from the first film, the pick-up truck Mater, as its hero. Scott’s disappointment could have something to do with the absence of human characters. “It may be intriguing to imagine what our toys do when we leave them behind,” Scott writes, “but there is something irreducibly grim about an entire planet ruled by mass-produced consumer goods whose producers and consumers are nowhere around.”