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  EW review: 'Chicken Little' falls downAlso: Beautiful 'Passenger,' incisive 'Wal-Mart'By Lisa Schwarzbaum  "Chicken Little" is a modern version of the "sky is falling" tale. YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- "Chicken Little," Disney's first fully computer-animated G-rated feature film, is a takeoff on the famous fable about the flustered fowl who gets conked on the head with an acorn and overreacts, convinced that the sky is falling. Accordingly, no conclusion will be drawn here about a sky-wide decline in Disney's storytelling capabilities based solely on the company's first direct bid to match the achievements of Pixar and DreamWorks. Instead, focus will remain on the banality of the acorns dropped in this particular endeavor, another in a new breed of mass-market comedy that substitutes self-reference for original wit and pop songs for emotional content. Production notes boast that Chicken Little himself (voiced by "Scrubs' " Zach Braff with generic ebullience) is computer-clad in more than 76,000 individual feathers, but what the cluck do we care about erisimilitude of plumage when the issues between the scrawny hero and his father (Garry Marshall) are so derivative? Dad's a single parent who at first doesn't believe in his son, until the arrival of real danger ignored by the town's adults, and squawk squawk squawk. The tech complexity employed to replicate muscle movement doesn't make up for the simplistic colorlessness of the characters -- including a recycled trio of fellow outsiders as Little's friends and a standard collection of naysayers and oddballs among his adversaries. Each represents a joke delivered before, and better, by "Finding Nemo," "The Incredibles," "Shrek," and the vast heaven of TV sitcoms. What falls in "Chicken Little" are hopes. EW Grade: C 'The Passenger'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman Jack Nicholson has played the easy-grin middle-aged rebel for so long that it's a shock, watching Michelangelo Antonioni's moody and fascinating 1975 art thriller "The Passenger," to be reminded of what a sleek smolder he once gave off. Tanned and brooding, with aviator sunglasses that set off his narrow chiseled features, Nicholson, in his prime, was handsome enough to cruise by on his looks, and the fact that he never did -- his anger, with its hint of torment, undercut any impulse toward vanity -- only enhanced the mordant sexiness of his latter-day Bogart appeal. "The Passenger," which is being rereleased in an elegant restored version, was essentially a collaboration between Antonioni, the high priest of postmodern upper-middle-class anxiety ("Blow-Up," "L'Avventura"), and Nicholson, the haunted superstar without a cause who embodied, more than any other actor of his era, the meeting of American dreams and despair. He plays David Locke, a television journalist, respected for his exposes, who finds himself in the North African desert, pursuing a story that holds no meaning for him -- no more so, he realizes, than his own life. When he learns that the friendly British chap in the motel room next to him has suffered a fatal heart attack, he switches passport photos and takes on the dead man's identity, literally wiping out his own existence. In design, "The Passenger" is reminiscent of Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, only this is like a Ripley opus played in slow motion, submerged in the desolate waters of inaction. Antonioni shows little interest in suspense mechanics. It turns out that Locke has assumed the identity of an international arms smuggler, but as he receives a payoff for a shipment he never makes, he displays no goal, no desire. Nicholson plays Locke's odyssey as a withdrawal from the world. The film is poised between our desire to see him escape to a new life and our curiosity about what's motivating his downward spiral. I never quite bought Nicholson as a journalist (if anything, he looks more dangerous than the gunrunner), and "The Passenger" has an overlay of radical-chic politics that has dated badly. We're supposed to accept that Locke, in his reporting, is guilty of reinforcing the corrupt colonial power dynamics that oppress African nations, and that by taking the place of a gunrunner who provides arms to guerrillas, he's flirting with becoming a moral man. Yet "The Passenger," a languidly beautiful film noir to nowhere, has a vividness that transcends its era. In Spain, Locke, pursued both by his wife and by his lethal new business associates, encounters a young woman who helps to sneak him out of his hotel room, and Maria Schneider, in her one prominent role after "Last Tango in Paris," proves remarkably sympathetic. She's like Elisabeth Shue in "Leaving Las Vegas," fulfilling her attraction to a lost man by smoothing his road to oblivion. "The Passenger" isn't finally the masterpiece some have made it out to be, but it retains a singular intrigue: It's the first, and probably the last, thriller ever made about depression. EW Grade: A- 'Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman With little fanfare, Robert Greenwald has become one of the most incisive activist filmmakers in America. Like his superb eve-of-the-election docs, "Uncovered: The War on Iraq" and "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism," "Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price" is an investigative outcry driven by stringent reporting rather than attitude. Mixing statistics and employee testimony, Greenwald details business practices that provoke a gathering outrage: the coerced unpaid overtime, the foreign sweatshop labor, the health-insurance packages (now being upgraded) that have left thousands of employees to rely on Medicaid, the sucking dry of mom-and-pop stores. Greenwald floats the vital issue of whether Wal-Mart should be restrained by antimonopoly regulations, but his real question is cultural: Even with its rock-bottom prices, is Wal-Mart in the best interest of American consumers? EW Grade: A- 'New York Doll'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman If you're going to make an entire documentary about a bass player, you could probably do worse than Arthur "Killer" Kane, who glowered like Lurch in a dress as he played with those seminal lipstick-punk glamsters, the New York Dolls. Three decades after the group's breakup, Kane, in L.A., is a recovering alcoholic and middle-aged nonentity. He says that he has saved himself by becoming a Mormon, yet he remains haunted by demons of failure. Preparing for a reunion concert with surviving Dolls David Johansen and Sylvain Sylvain, Kane, looking like a bedraggled Liam Neeson, must conquer his jealousy. This makes for a modestly touching journey, but "New York Doll," in its wafer-thin way, is an oxymoron: a hagiographic tribute to a rocker with more passion than talent. EW Grade: B 'G'Reviewed by Gregory Kirschling "The Great Gatsby" was famously bungled in the pulseless 1974 movie with Robert Redford. "G," which updates the story with an African-American cast, is another strikeout, further destroying F. Scott Fitzgerald's film batting average. Shot in 2001 and produced by Ralph Lauren's son Andrew, it features good work from Richard T. Jones ("The Wood"), burning quietly as Summer G, a hip-hop mogul fond of mood swings and loud parties at his Hamptons mansion. Summer's in love with Sky (Chenoa Maxwell), a fellow Hamptonite, but Sky -- the movie's Daisy -- is a runaway conceptual mess. She's still rich and gorgeous, and still married to a lout (Blair Underwood). But now she's proud and serious and fierce, a positive spin that renders her decision to break Gatsby's heart completely nonsensical. The new dumb, soapy, twist ending is set at an "all-white" party at the manse, fueling the marginally entertaining notion that Summer is a very thinly disguised Diddy. EW Grade: C Click Here 
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