The 100 Best Sci-Fi Films Of All Time - Page 6 of 10

blank50. “They Live” (1988)
Somewhat unloved even among John Carpenter’s matchless 1980s canon at the time, “They Live” has long been a cult favorite, but has found new fans of late as we appear to have walked into the world that it depicts. A satirical sci-fi actioner that sees late wrestler Roddy Piper discover through some magic sunglasses that aliens are taking over, it’s energetic, thrilling, acerbically funny and subversive throughout, AND it has the greatest fist fight ever filmed.

blank49. “Strange Days” (1995)
Cyberpunk has rarely been served well by American film, but Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days” arguably is the greatest non-“Matrix” Hollywood iteration of the genre. A sci-fi noir about Lenny (Ralph Fiennes giving great scuzzy hero), a peddler of recorded memories in then-near-future 1999, it’s a thrilling, textured time capsule of post-L.A. riots and pre-millennium paranoia, and it’s eerily prophetic with it, even if the future it predicted took a little longer to come to pass.

blank48. “Alphaville” (1965)
Godard’s lone true sci-fi picture takes French cinema’s favorite FBI agent, Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) and puts him into a noirish dystopian future with a dream logic around it. It’s the director’s purest experiment with genre, but done in typical Godard fashion: full of style, politics and philosophy to the forefront, and with no intent of satisfying you narratively. It’s an amazing, heady film, and we wish Godard had made more like it.

blank47. “THX 1138” (1971)
It’s hard to think of two more dissimilar films nominally in the same genre as George Lucas‘ adventure-based, story-drunk “Star Wars” and his feature debut, this hypnotic slow burn starring a dreamily dissociated Robert Duvall. Set in the 25th century, when love and sex have been outlawed, its plot borrows from every sci-fi trope in sight, but nothing can detract from the anachronistic pleasures of the visuals and atmosphere — the past’s idea of the future.

blank46. “Her” (2013)
Some futurescapes feel close enough to touch, and the incredible intimacy of Spike Jonze‘s techno-inflected love story almost makes “Her” seem so current as to hardly be sci-fi. That’s because the focus is not on the trappings of Theodore’s (Joaquin Phoenix) world, but the relationship between him and his ever-more-human OS (Scarlett Johansson, in a stunning voice-only role) that is an analog for any love affair in which the lovers grow together until they start to grow apart.

blank45. “World On A Wire” (1973)
The idea that the world as we know it is a construction or a simulation has been explored on budgets big and small through the ages, most famously culminating in “The Matrix,” but it’s perhaps never been done as dazzlingly as in this extreme-slo-mo supernova of ideas and extraordinary filmmaking from Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 3 ½ hours of noir-inflected, heady sci-fi, featuring the quirks of his style (arch dialogue, non-naturalist performances) this also boasts some of the most stunning camerawork in his whole fascinating oeuvre.

blank44. “Attack The Block” (2011)
As “Get Out” proved recently, the melding of genre and social issues can yield terrific results, and Joe Cornish‘s alien-attack movie falls right in line with that. Partly a funny-scary monster movie, and partly an eloquent comment on the stubborn class structures and mutual hostility housed in a South London tower block, John Boyega‘s smoldering performance here could blister paint, and rightly launched him to star(wars)dom.

blank43. “Total Recall” (1990)
The contradiction at the heart of Paul Verhoeven‘s “Total Recall” is that on the one hand it’s a film of high-minded sci-fi ideas, based on a Philip K. Dick story, that deals in heady themes of memory, identity, and psychological dislocation. On the other hand: Arnold Schwarzenegger. The combination makes it a barnstormingly enjoyable, winkingly self-aware blast, as though Verhoeven is impishly delighted at giving all that cerebrality such brawny blockbuster form.

blank42. “Inception” (2010)
Singular proof that original-concept blockbusters can perform at the box office, Christopher Nolan‘s massively ambitious nesting-doll puzzle-box movie combines stunning visuals with a starry cast to grandiose effect. It’s so spectacularly polished, in fact, and ticks along so cleverly according to its own internal dream-logic, that even the mild disappointment that it ultimately comes down to Leonardo DiCaprio failing yet another wife can’t put a dink in its chrome-smooth surface.

blank41. “Silent Running” (1971)
If you were to imagine the type of science fiction film a special effects pioneer would make as a director, it’s highly unlikely it’d be as quiet as Douglas Trumbull‘s eco-minded “Silent Running.” The ‘2001,’ “Blade Runner,” ‘Close Encounters‘ and “Tree of Life” effects maven made his directing debut in thoughtful, slow, restrained fashion, almost as a one-man-show in which Bruce Dern plays, essentially, the loneliest spaceman in cinema.