Academy Awards nominee: District 9

This low-budget sci-fi film - make that no-budget, in comparison with Avatar - starts with a familiar scene: a giant flying saucer hovering above a city. However this is not Manhattan or Washington, but Johannesburg, and the arthropod aliens aboard the spacecraft are starving extraterrestrial refugees.

Once rescued, they are placed in a temporary camp which eventually becomes a squalid slum - District 9 - while Neill Blomkamp's exhilarating film is quickly seen to be an allegory of racism and apartheid, inspired by actual events which took place in a segregated area of Cape Town in the 1980s.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID:Chris Hewitt, Empire: "District 9 works primarily as a fun thriller, peopled - or aliened - by some of the best (and strangest) extraterrestrials this side of ET. Eschewing the guy-in-a-suit approach, Blomkamp plumps for aliens that truly define the word: non-humanoid, multi-limbed clicking monstrosities, derogatorily referred to as "prawns", that can leap small buildings in a single bound, rip a man's head off in a heartbeat and interact seamlessly with humans, their jittery body language strangely, beguilingly, human." (Verdict: four stars out of five)

A O Scott, New York Times: "District 9 subtly shifts from speculative science-fiction to zombie bio-horror and then, less subtly, turns into an escape-action-chase movie full of explosions, gunplay and vehicular mayhem. In the midst of it all you almost take for granted the carefully rendered details of the setting, the tightness of the editing and the inventiveness of the special effects. Not the least of these are the aliens themselves, who are made expressive and soulful without quite being anthropomorphised."

Betsy Sharkey, LA Times: "Blomkamp has seeded irony and analogies throughout District 9 as he makes his way through a myriad of modern anxieties including the racial divide, class differences, big business, broadcast news and the big-brother world of reality TV. One of the many themes Blomkamp kicks around is the numbing effect of the endless loop of information and analysis on cable news..."

'District 9' is out on DVD ·