70. Repo Man (1984)
Not to be confused by that bad action movie where Jude Law tries to steal people’s kidneys, Alex Cox’s counter-culture cult fave, about two repo men (Emilio Estevez and Harry Dean Stanton) who end up with a car full of radioactive aliens, is a raucous blast. It’s a rare film that truly captured the punk spirit, its absurdist humor and anything-goes action feeling as fresh today as it did three decades ago.
69. “Laputa: Castle In The Sky” (1986)
Anime giant Hayao Miyazaki has mostly shifted from sci-fi into fantasy as his career’s continued, but his third feature “Laputa: Castle In The Sky” shows why that’s something of a shame: a rollicking full-blooded adventure with sky pirates, giant robots and lost floating cities, it’s a truly rousing and spectacular picture that serves as a great entry-point to the director’s work.
68. “Le Voyage Dans La Lune” (1902)
We’ve mostly excluded short films here, but to miss Georges Méliès’ “A Trip To The Moon” from a list of the best sci-fi films would be like excluding Chuck Berry from a history of rock and roll. This Jules Verne-indebted short details the construction of a cannon that rockets adventurers to our lunar satellite, and contains one of cinema’s most famous images, as the ship embeds itself in the face of the man in the moon.
67. “A Clockwork Orange” (1971)
To be honest, “A Clockwork Orange” might be this writer’s least favorite Kubrick movie. But a least favorite Kubrick is often better than entire cumulative careers of other filmmakers, and while his adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ near-future dystopia is an inherently unlovable and difficult movie, it remains a film of singular and sinister vision, to the extent that the director himself, afraid of its impact, banned its exhibition in the UK for the rest of his lifetime.
66. “Fahrenheit 451” (1966)
There’s enough room for improvement in Francois Truffaut’s take on Ray Bradbury’s dystopian classic, set in a world that has banned literature, that Ramin Bahrani’s upcoming HBO take could yet become the definitive version. We’d agree with Scorsese that Truffaut’s sole English-language movie is highly underrated — sometimes clunky and miscast, but the film builds a fascinating world with Truffaut’s typical texture and deeply felt emotion.
65. “Dark City” (1998)
Another one of those what-is-reality pictures that dominated towards the end of the millennium, this expressionist noir stunner is easily Alex Proyas’ best film, a visually breathtaking tale of an amnesiac man (Rufus Sewell) with psychic powers who uncovers a conspiracy in the Gothic city of the title. It certainly puts style over substance, but finds substance in the style to the extent that it feels like a substantial meal, not just showing off.
64. “Fantastic Planet” (1973)
Though you would think that the medium would be perfectly suited, given its ability to supersede budgetary issues, hard sci-fi doesn’t always seem to work in animation. A major exception would be the amazing “Fantastic Planet,” by director Rene Laloux. A surreal, far-out vision full of freaky creatures and a sort of dream logic, with the aesthetic of an Eastern Bloc movie poster, it’s a remarkable piece of work even if you’re not on some kind of hallucinatory drug.
63. “Snowpiercer” (2013)
With its distribution fuckery now a thing of the past, Bong Joon Ho’s English language debut stands as a prescient, darkly funny, deeply political sci-fi allegory. Set entirely on a train, divided by economic class, as it speeds through an icy apocalyptic wasteland, it has the relentless linear drive of an action movie, and the comic grotesquerie of Terry Gilliam, plus a brace of great performances including one of Tilda Swinton’s very finest, as British Prime Minister Theresa May.
62. “Starman” (1984)
Famously, Columbia passed on “E.T.” in order to focus on the making of “Starman,” and while it didn’t turn out well for them financially, we’re still glad they did. John Carpenter’s least Carpenter-ish film sees alien Jeff Bridges come to earth and taking the form of the dead husband of the deceased husband of Jenny (Karen Allen). It’s a sweet, warm genre-bender, part road movie, part rom-com, part “Close Encounters,” and with a great Bridges turn at the center.
61. “Godzilla” (1954)
Gareth Edwards’ recent reboot was visually stunning and thematically fascinating, but it didn’t quite unseat Ishirō Honda’s 1954 original as the definitive take on the giant lizard. You might mock the man-in-suite effects now, but the film takes the creature deadly seriously, and its allegory, both for the destructiveness that Japan inflicted in World War 2, and the nuclear bomb dropped on the nation that ended the conflict, still packs a kaiju-sized punch.