60. “Timecrimes” (2007)
Currenly having an indie success in theaters with the very good “Colossal,” Spanish helmer Nacho Vigalondo broke through with this ingenious time-travel puzzle box about a man who stumbles upon a time machine and is menaced by a masked man. Feeling genuinely cinematic on a low budget and scope, it’s an audacious debut that’s never anything less than thoroughly entertaining to unpack and discuss.
59. “Gravity” (2013)
Barely qualifying as sci-fi in the traditional sense (most of the technology used is close to current), Alfonso Cuaron’s 3D thrill-ride nevertheless does what the genre does best: using spectacle to provide you an experience you’ll likely never get in real life, but in order to tell very human stories. His bravura story of a grieving astronaut (Sandra Bullock) trying to survive a catastrophic space disaster thrills like few other films, but also proves disarmingly moving by the end.
58. “District 9” (2009)
Follow-ups “Elysium” and “Chappie” haven’t yet delivered on that initial promise, but “District 9” suggested, and still does, that South African helmer Neill Blomkamp could turn out to be a sci-fi filmmaker of the stature of a James Cameron or a Ridley Scott. Essentially what would happen if Ricky Gervais’ “The Office” was directed by “Robocop” era Paul Verhoeven, it’s a hilarious, splattery, hugely exciting blockbuster with a social conscience.
57. “Planet Of The Apes” (1968)
The legendary ending of Franklin J Schaffner‘s original go-round at adapting Pierre Boulle‘s novel looms so large in the popular consciousness, that, like a partially buried Statue of Liberty, it can be hard to see past. But the really cool thing about ‘Planet of the Apes’ is just how unlikely a hit it was, so high-concept, so potentially off-putting in its weirdness. But not only did the Charlton Heston-starrer rake in the cash, it spawned endless sequels, one huge turkey of a reboot, and a second relaunch that’s among the best ongoing franchises we have.
56. Dark Star (1974)
The film that put John Carpenter on the map, this ultra-low-budget, impressively ambitious sci-fi comedy is strikingly different from the filmmaker’s later movies and is rougher around the edges, but even this early holds the characteristics that would make him a legend: unexpected, almost absurdist humor, a glorious eye and facility for character, those synthy scores. And while it’s funny, it captures the madness of space in a way that few bar “2001” have managed.
55. “Gattaca” (1997)
Andrew Niccol is another one who’s never quite lived up to the potential of his debut (or his script from “The Truman Show”), but his debut “Gattaca” is so good that we’ll always root for him to get there. Set in a world where eugenic reproduction is common, it’s a thoughtful, thematically potent near-future tale with a stunning, austere visual aesthetic, and two decades on, it’s aged remarkably well.
54. “Solaris” (2002)
Teaming up with James Cameron for a remake of Tarkovsky’s sci-fi classic starring George Clooney might have been Steven Soderbergh’s most hubristic move, and audiences reacted as such, with the film tanking and getting a rare F Cinemascore. But it actually comes remarkably close to exceeding the original: centered on arguably Clooney’s most stripped down and moving performance, it plays a note of such sustained, beautiful sadness that it becomes its own thing entirely.
53. “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001)
A little android (Haley Joel Osment) is rejected by the family he is programmed to love and in a futurist reimagining of “Pinocchio” embarks on a journey to try to become “real”. It’s unmistakable, throughout “A.I.” that the film is the child of two fathers, and sometimes the differences in parenting technique show. However, when they’re filmmakers of the caliber of Stanley Kubrick, who first developed the film, and Steven Spielberg, to whom Kubrick handed the reins before his death, the result is never less than fascinating.
52. “Altered States” (1980)
The unlikely team-up of Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky promised much, and psychedelic sci-fi/horror “Altered States” delivered in spades. William Hurt stars as a scientist attempting to investigate other states of consciousness who finds a substance that transforms him into other forms, and it’s a film so bizarre that it’s hard to believe it was made by a major studio, with trippy hallucination sequences, a wild meld of tones and inventive visual effects.
51. “Sleeper” (1973)
One of the earliest and funniest movies of Woody Allen’s early, funny ones, “Sleeper” sees Allen play a man accidentally frozen for 200 years and waking up in a strange future where sex is done through machines and America is ruled by a police state. It’s probably the closest thing that Allen made to a Buster Keaton picture, and while he would make more substantial films, he wouldn’t make many that were as purely funny as this.