District 9

So she says to me, "no, don't think it's my kind of movie, but I look forwards to reading about it on your blog." Oh God that means I'll have to write something. Much easier to keep writing when there's actually a project on, or your stuck in the back of beyond with nothing much to do do but read write or drink.
So. District 9. South African movie about a repressive state and it's treatment of an 'inferior' culture. With ray guns.
Plot, if you don't know is that a huge spaceship full of vaguely insectoid aliens arrives over Johannesburg, for no very obvious reason. The aliens are released from the spaceship and form a discriminated against, sub-human population living in a ghetto rather too close to the human population for comfort. The hero is a minor, Office style bureaucrat given the job of serving eviction notices on the aliens so that they can be moved to a rural homeland. There's just a touch of apartheid metaphor going on here. A MucGuffin starts to transform the hero into an alien, resulting in everyone wanting to catch and use him.
That could be a fairly standard plot for a fairly standard film, especially given the way towards the end of the film it does devolve into a bit of a demo for a Half-Life style shoot 'em up. Could be quite a good shoot 'em up mind you. But two things lift the film from the mundane into the remarkable.
The whole thing is shot in an eye catching documentary fashion. Hardly the first film done in this way, but done here very well, intercutting scenes apparently shot on a camcorder, TV reports from the local and global television and after the fact interviews with the protagonists. It works remarkably well, giving the whole thing a distinctive and captivating style.
As importantly, the central performance, by Sharlto Copley, is astounding. Starting off as a comic idiot and frontman for an inhuman corporation, he both looses physical humanity over the course of the film and gains the compassion that makes us more genuinely human. Magnificent piece of work from someone who apparently had never acted in a feature film before.
Probably not one of the great movies of our time, not that it's trying to be, but a damn fine B-movie.