South London Holds the Line

A gang of teenage boys mugs a woman on a South London housing estate on Guy Fawkes Night and runs straight into an alien invasion. That’s the premise of Attack the Block, Joe Cornish’s 2011 debut, and yes, it sounds ridiculous—it earns every minute anyway.

John Boyega plays Moses, quiet and serious, the natural center of gravity for the group, in a breakout performance that makes his subsequent career feel inevitable. The alien design is genuinely clever: creatures so dark they’re nearly invisible except for bioluminescent teeth that flicker through the black like a threat you can’t quite locate. The estate becomes a maze the kids know better than anything that could drop from the sky.

What Cornish does that most genre films won’t is make the heroes out of the kids who are normally the danger in these stories—the ones you’d cross the street to avoid, the ones a straight thriller would burn through as disposable menace. Attack the Block puts them front and center and never condescends to them for it. Nick Frost floats through on comic relief from a weed den four floors up, which is exactly right.

Fast, sharp, and genuinely fond of its setting. A film that knows what it is and commits completely. I loved it.