District 9 posterThe big noise this week is being made by Neill Blomkamp’s Dis­trict 9 which you can see at Read­ings, Empire, Embassy and Sky City Queens­gate. Blomkamp had been tapped by Peter Jack­son to dir­ect the Halo movie that he was co-pro­du­cing along with Microsoft. When that fell over Jack­son offered Blomkamp the chance to expand and revis­it his short Alive in Joburg from 2005. And the almost instant rush of acclaim for Dis­trict 9 has been intox­ic­at­ing. I don’t get to see it until the week­end but I know a lot of people who have and all are rav­ing. What is it about? A bunch of ali­ens are segreg­ated and ghetto-ised in mod­ern South Africa. After nearly 30 years as second class cit­izens ten­sions are reach­ing boil­ing point.

[The rest of this week’s new releases after the jump.]

I have seen Case 39, an unre­mark­able hor­ror about a mon­ster child. Ren­ee Zell­weger is the social work­er who takes the child under her wing and The Hangover’s Brad­ley Cooper is a psy­cho­lo­gist who ends up on the wrong side of the satan­ic ten-year-old. Read­ings and Sky City Queens­gate.

You might think that Sun­shine Clean­ing is in a little light­er vein until you read that it is about two sis­ters who run a busi­ness clean­ing up crime scenes after the forensics have fin­ished their work. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are the two women and the film is dir­ec­ted by kiwi Christine Jeffs (Rain) and shot by her part­ner John Toon. You’ll find it at Read­ings, Pent­house, Light­house Petone and Sky City Queens­gate.

Battle in Seattle is open­ing a week later than ori­gin­ally planned and not at the Para­mount – they pulled the film with only three weeks notice. Uncon­firmed rumours sug­gest that the Para­moun­t’s ACT-lean­ing own­ers dropped the film because of its polit­ics, a stunt they pulled back in April 2008 with John Pil­ger­’s The War on Demo­cracy. It’s as if they’d rather make a point than make money. You can see Battle in Seattle (a recre­ation of the first major anti-glob­al­isa­tion protests dur­ing the WTO meet­ing in 1999) at the Empire in Island Bay who I’m sure will hap­pily take some of your money in exchange for let­ting you watch it.

Instead of Battle in Seattle the Para­mount is bring­ing back Luit Bieringa’s Wel­ling­ton doc­u­ment­ary The Man in the Hat from the recently com­pleted Film Fest­iv­al. It’s a por­trait of Cuba Street art deal­er and beloved iden­tity Peter McLeavey.

Finally, I don’t know much about the Pent­house-exclus­ive The Rock­et Post except what I can glean from the BBC (via IMDb):

“Set on the eve of World War II, Dan­ish thesp Ulrich Thom­sen stars as Ger­man sci­ent­ist Ger­hard Zuch­er who aims to estab­lish a new­fangled rock­et-pro­pelled postal ser­vice in the Scot­tish isles. Although it does­n’t fire on all cyl­in­ders, this account is quietly intriguing.”

All these films (except Battle in Seattle which fea­tured last week) will be reviewed in next week’s Cap­it­al Times and, yes, I know I’m still a month behind in post­ing the reviews to Funer­als & Snakes.