First-time director Joe Cornish channels the 70′s and 80′s masterworks of John Carpenter and Walter Hill with Attack The Block, a post-modern take on the alien invasion genre.

Charting the events of one night in a South London block of high-rise flats, Attack The Block tells the story of a five-strong gang of youngsters charged with the task of defending their “turf” from a sight altogether more extraterrestrial than the rival gangs and “feds” that they’re usually up against. Led by Moses (newcomer John Boyega), the gang must employ an arsenal consisting of fireworks, machetes and decorative Katana samurai swords in their fight against an army of intergalactic invaders.

Cornish, an expatriate of television and radio, and one with whom this writer is only very loosely familiar, manages to finely balance comedy and drama, setting both to a highly cinematic background of spectacle and finely tuned characterisation. Not unlike its greatest influences, Attack The Block throws in a scathing commentary alongside the thrills and the laughs. Biting discourses on the welfare system, justice and antecedence sit between the set-pieces, with a shift in tone during the last act particularly affecting. In turn this provide Attack The Block with its greatest facet, in that the film genuinely feels sincere. Cornish resists the temptation of including such traditional tropes as a hokey romantic subplot, or of attempting to explore the broken familiar relationships at the heart of the film in any way not befitting the characters themselves. You don’t get the impression that the filmmaker was trying to emulate some kind of subculture that he didn’t understand, nor do you feel patronised by its representation of youth, which for a film of this ilk is really quite something.

Several of this years greatest hits at the cinematheque come courtesy of directors borne of the television screen. Filmmakers as diverse as Richard Ayoade and Joanna Hogg plied their trade on television for many years before embarking upon a career in the cinema, and now Cornish can be added to their esteemed ranks, suggesting that the British television industry is a surprisingly fruitful breeding ground for successful filmmaking talent (and let’s not forget that this year’s Academy Award for Best Director went to a former alumni of the Eastenders school of direction).