District 9

District 9 is a wildly ambitious sci-fi movie with a virtuoso performance by Sharlto Copley as an inept South African bureaucrat who is given the task of relocating about 2 million alien (as in space) refugees from a squalid containment camp to another.... After being exposed to some alien DNA, Copley becomes a whole other character and heads roll (literally). It's fierce and bloody and fun.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" takes the unique "battlefield" horrors of the war in Iraq and their effect on service men and turns the resulting madness both inward and outward with an intensity I've not felt in a film for quite a while. The film follows a trio of short-timers in a bomb squad as they move from one impossibly tense encounter with IEDs or suicide bombers to the next.