District 9 (2009), Neil Blomkamp
What would happen if a spacecraft packed to the rafters with alien folk drifted into our atmosphere and stalled above a major city; like, say, Johannesburg? Neil Blomkamp asks this and other tricky questions in District 9 and the answers are bleak. With a less than subtle nod towards the apartheid, the cat-food loving aliens (or 'prawns' as they are unaffectionately known) are housed in a crime-ridden, impoverished slum. Wikus, an Afrikaner bureaucrat, is ordered to relocate the prawns to a new camp much further outside the city (they're not liked, much). It's a disastrous affair, particularly as Wikus sprays himself in the face with a liquid that sets off his own mutation into one of the beings. He's snaffled up by the government and subjected to some awful tests, before narrowly escaping vivisection and heading for the slum. Thus begins a violent quest to reverse the transformation that sees him form an uneasy alliance with Christopher, a prawn that may have the solution. This is sublime South African sci-fi with a bitter political undertone.