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  EW review: Wonderful 'Ant Bully'Also: Disappointing 'Scoop,' unfunny 'Sunshine'By Lisa Schwarzbaum  A boy finds himself among a colony of ants in "The Ant Bully." YOUR E-MAIL ALERTS(Entertainment Weekly) -- Maybe it's because the Ant Queen (summer's movie MVP, Meryl Streep) is so excellently magisterial. Or because Nurse Ant Hova and Wizard Ant Zoc (Julia Roberts and Nicolas Cage, both of them loose and playful -- yes, Cage is playful, not gloomy!) are such a cool formicary couple. Or because the goggling, goofy-glasses IMAX 3D experience (available, as they say, in select theaters) magnifies the charms, and the dramas, of very teensy insects and one temporarily tiny boy. All I know is, the kind of life lessons that usually gum up the fun go down as easily as jelly beans in "The Ant Bully," an effortlessly clever animated confection directed by "Jimmy Neutron" creator John A. Davis, who also wrote the screenplay. True enough, it's not nice to be mean. And in the beginning (as in John Nickle's illustrated kids' book of the same name), 10-year-old Lucas Nickle (Zach Tyler Eisen) persecutes downward, stomping a convenient anthill after being tormented by the neighborhood blobby brute. And only when Lucas himself is shrunk (by, oh, the usual -- a magic potion whipped up by Zoc and dropped in the kid's ear) does he learn what cooperation, friendship, and awesome ant culture are all about. Yeah, yeah. Point is, bugs -- and a bug-size boy --are funny. And, following "Monster House," another PG cartoon turns out to be a secret clubhouse for the cool kids this summer. EW Grade: B+ 'Scoop'Reviewed by Lisa Schwarzbaum The dual elixirs of London and Scarlett Johansson did wonders for Woody Allen last year. On holiday from a hometown that had lost all expression of vitality in his movies, temporarily transplanted to London, and creatively aroused by a strikingly confident young actress not yet 22, Allen responded with "Match Point," his best movie in years, and his most psychologically liberated. In Johansson's bold and blunt-talking presence, the septuagenarian director found permission to trade in his worn-out character types for players who were audacious and surprising. And in Allen, the throaty star of "Lost in Translation" with the cool, open look of all-American sexual self-possession found an amusing, elderly gentleman champion of delightful and delightfully flattering intellectual cachet. It's easy to see why the two would want to work together in London again. But it's hard to fathom how, in so short a time, the enduring Svengali of neurotic mannerisms could have gotten one of Hollywood's most individualistic sirens to sound like Julie Kavner and behave like yet another jabbering schlemiel from Mr. Allen's neighborhood, joining the ranks of zombified imitators as diverse as Will Ferrell, Christina Ricci, and Kenneth Branagh. In the labored romantic-comedy whodunit "Scoop" -- a companion piece to "Match Point" that suffers all the more in comparison -- the fearless Hitchcock blonde plays along with the conceit that she's the infelicitously named Sondra Pransky, styled with nerd-girl eyeglasses. A Jewish college student who switched from dental studies to journalism, Sondra is visiting posh family friends in London when a chance visit to a borscht-belt-type magic show staged by one Sid Waterman (Allen) changes her fate (a plot device reworked from his own chapter in "New York Stories"), putting her on the trail of a serial murderer known as the Tarot Card Killer. Is the fiend in fact the suave aristocrat Peter Lyman (Hugh Jackman)? Intelligence is iffy, since the tip was provided to Sondra during Sid's magic act by the visiting ghost of a recently deceased newspaperman (Ian McShane, reminding us, by his very stare, to watch "Deadwood"). As in "Match Point," the class-resistant Yank is attracted to the upper-class Brit, falling into a romance with Lyman that allows plenty of time for "Match Point" cinematographer Remi Adefarasin to admire stately homes and gardens. But unlike its predecessor, "Scoop" also possessively tethers its bodacious leading lady to the uber-shtick of Allen himself. For a fellow so slight of frame, he has become a leaden weight on screen, and his hiccuping delivery of hoary self-referential jokes about Jewish anxiety and ineptitude, along with Woodyish predilections for much younger women, has worn from the dully familiar to the downright irritating. Blessed with an actress who raises his game, Allen has scooped up Johansson -- and neutralized her power. EW Grade: C 'Little Miss Sunshine'Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman All happy families are alike. All dysfunctional families, at least in the movies, are unhappy -- and unhilarious -- in different ways. If you're going to get on the wavelength of "Little Miss Sunshine," you've got to be able to enjoy a comedy in which the characters fit into hermetically cute, predetermined sitcom slots. The members of the Hoover clan include the ineffectual boob of a father (Greg Kinnear), who's desperate to market his annoyingly unoriginal "9 Steps" motivational program; a saintly sourpuss mom (Toni Collette); her gay brother, a suicidal Proust scholar (Steve Carell); the teen son (Paul Dano), who hates his family so much that he hasn't spoken in a year; and Grandpa (Alan Arkin), a grouch who stokes his X-rated "I got nothin' to lose!" commentary by snorting heroin. Sorry, folks, but these are not organic characters; they're walking, talking catalogs of screenwriter index-card data. One can't deny, though, that there's an idiosyncratic plastic cleverness to "Little Miss Sunshine." As the family drives to Redondo Beach so that 7-year-old Olive (the charming Abigail Breslin) can compete in the Little Miss Sunshine preteen pageant, the movie shrouds its synthetic soul in a patina of "indie" realism: the leisurely rhythms, the lovely desert road-movie vistas, the terrific actors doing what they can to alchemize schlock into gold. The beauty-pageant climax is pure hypocrisy, as the movie mocks the freakish baby-whore contestants yet celebrates Olive for doing, in essence, just what they do. Smarmy? Yes, but more than that, not funny. EW Grade: C Click Here 
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