Movie Nation

“Pusher” is a straight, no chaser thriller set on the bottom rung of the drug trade ladder. A remake of a 1996 Danish thriller, it’s a pulsating, propulsive and nerve-wracking film that breathes new life into a genre whose tropes wore out long ago.

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Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus” plays like the “Alien” franchise’s greatest hits. Scott, revisiting the 1979 sci-fi classic that made him famous, samples “Alien,” James Cameron’s “Aliens” and the later films in the series for this state-of-the-art prequel, using plot points, situations, versions of characters and themes from those films to back-engineer his way into the day humans first ran into the ultimate alien killing machine.

It’s good-looking film with a first-rate cast. But “Prometheus” is to “Alien” what “2010” was to “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It’s the difference between a masterpiece and a merely watchable revision of that masterpiece.

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Project X” is the movie equivalent of that good-looking, well-off teenage boy your gut tells you to keep away from your teenage daughter. He may turn on the charm, come from what we assume is a “good family” (as if money were a determiner). But something sets off the warning bells — that he has lost his mind to his hormones, that he objectifies women in the worst way, that he’s too-casual with the homophobic slurs.

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If you only see ONE demonic possession/Jewish exorcism movie this year, make it “The Possession.”

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Michael Shannon plays a villain with “impulse control issues” in the bike courier thriller “Premium Rush.” Shannon fans will salivate at the thought of that. Nobody can turn on the scary like Michael Shannon.

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 Who knew there was this much fun left in glee clubs this long after “Glee!” jumped the shark?

“Pitch Perfect” is a frothy, funny, dizzy and derivative farce set in the competitive world of college a cappella groups, “Glee!” without the soap opera or the sex, but stuffed with comic caricatures, hilarious one-liners and blessed with a cast that’s up to the challenge.

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There’s an inviolable law of animated films — the more “names” you have in the voice cast, the weaker you know your film is.

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 “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” is wistful, witty, romantic and sentimental, almost a “Breakfast Club” for the new millennium. It’s not high school as it really was and is. It is high school as it really should be.

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“The Perfect Family” might have been perfectly edgy and controversial — ten years ago. The material — a devout Catholic wife and mother who is so active in her parrish that she’s up for “Catholic Woman of the Year” — if only she can keep the monsignor, archbishop, pope and the rest from knowing her gay daughter just got married, her married son is carrying on an affair and her husband used to drink and cheat — had the makings of something madcap, broad and manic, with a hint of heart.

But this Kathleen Turner vehicle is a stiff, a picture with so little urgency that it drags on like a sermon without end, with all the flavor of a communion wafer.

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