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.