Set in Johannesburg (more than a welcome change to the usual formulaic Hollywood paradigm whereby LA or New York are not only the backdrop for disaster but act too as the centre-point of planet Earth), An ominous mothership hovers above Johannesburg containing an alien race of insectoid refugees. Derogatively referred to as 'Prawns' by humans they are cordoned off in an apartheid-esque fashion and forced to live a desolate and slum-like existence in the titular District 9. While forcibly relocat find out more...

Lonely, bullied 12-year-old Oskar fantasises about taking bloody revenge on his tormentors and Eli, his new neighbour, might look 12-years-old too, but she's been that way for rather a long time, and her fantasies involving blood are somewhat different! An unlikely alliance forms between the two in this subtle combination of pre-teen male/female bonding and vampire lore... all set in a snowbound Swedish working class suburb. find out more...

Another superlative cinematic tour de force from the Coen brothers. A Vietnam Vet stumbles across the bloody remnants of a shoot out, pockets some booty and disappears pursued by Javier Bardem's relentless, dead eyed assassin. An ageing, disillusioned sheriff, the excellent Tommy Lee Jones, whose small town rural values have been eroded by the inexorable rise in brutal drug-crime related violence is the reluctant, but dogged, cop in pursuit of both hitman and thief. What follows is a battle of w find out more...

Born in New Orleans, abandoned and adopted on the day of the end of WWI, Benjamin Button is a medical mystery. Entering life as a physically old man, over the course of his remarkable existence he rejuvenates to infancy. He has a unique, poignant, but also joyous, perspective on the world around him. Very loosely adapted from F Scott Fitzgerald's excellent short story of the same title, 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' is a beautifully visualised and whimsical tale that drifts through the e find out more...

It's 1980s East Germany and our anti-hero, an accomplished surveillance officer, is ordered to spy on a successful and outwardly loyal playwright and his actress girlfriend, but the motive is not entirely political, involving the lust for the girl of a political commissar and the career prospects of his immediate superior. The Stasi officer is dragged into the Kafkaesque web created by this moral duplicity in this compelling and twisting tale. First class. find out more...