District 9 has been one of the most highly anticipated films of 2009 - and that can be said without adding the qualifier of sci-fi. The basic premise being aliens pull up over Johannesburg but... due to the nature of their society, they don't really have any leadership. So they sit around on their ship for three months before people cut it open.

We then jump forward a couple of decades and the ship is still sitting there and District 9 is a big shanty town for the million or so "prawns" that were inside the ship. People seem pretty blasé about the aliens, in fact - even actively hostile, with resentment and a demand for segregation. Needless to say, while none of the characters in the film ever MENTION Apartheid - the parallels are blatant and utterly undisguised.

If you can live with that, then this is an interesting film. Enjoyable, action packed and certainly one of the smartest films of the year thus far. There are a few plot holes and the change in the style (the film starts in a documentary style and then for reasons that are fairly obvious, it becomes more conventional) can be a little jarring... but certainly an all around entertaining film that looks AMAZING for the comparatively modest budget of $30m. Honestly, the fact that the aliens in this film are almost entirely CGI is easy to forget and films with bigger budgets have done far less convincing work, with far more money.