The 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Movies of All Time (2023)

Like its close cousin in the genre (niece/nephew?) the superhero movie, the potential of cinematic science fiction exploded in the latter part of the 20th century thanks to technological advances that transformed special effects. Unlike superhero movies, which have been so stunted for so long that almost every new one makes it to our updated version.The 100 best superhero movies of all time.list, science fiction has proven to be fertile ground for filmmakersbeforenames like Industrial Light & Magic have enhanced a director's ability to exceed our imagination. So this list, while full of movies from the '80s and up, does have its fair share of older movies. Before we dive into that though, let's discuss a few things this list will do.nohas (or at least hasn't)severalof).

Superhero movies are almost always absent. While plenty of superhero stories involve the sci-fi stuff—aliens, high-tech, and weird worlds—there are way too many great sci-fi movies to include on this list without ruling out 20 of them for DC and the MCU. We've also dropped the traditional giant monster/kaiju movie for the same reason. If you want a good rundown of Godzilla's greatest hits, check out our very own Jim Vorel.ranking of Godzilla's cinematographic work. (For true range-o-edge kaiju, Jim also took the measurement ofevery Godzilla monster.) Finally, uniting superheroes and kaiju on the sidelines are post-apocalyptic (and some mid-apocalyptic) movies. While, again, there are a few exceptions, for the most part you won't find Mad Max here, or Eli, or even that guy who is Legend. (I see you frowning - "But will there be dystopias", you ask? Of course we do, we have dystopias.)

As you'll see below, that makes for a lot of great movies. As we live our lives with devices more powerful than the supercomputers of a few decades ago, take a few hours here and there to check out some of them you haven't seen yet and revisit some you do. Laugh at those futuristic visions that now seem too far-fetched, marvel at those that still amaze you, and perhaps squirm uncomfortably at those that hit too close to home.

Here are the top 100 sci-fi movies of all time:

100.A trip to the moon(1902)

Director:Jorge Melies

TimeA trip to the moonOnly 15 minutes long, it still feels epic (plus, that running time wasn't considered that short in 1902). In turn, this light and colorful collage (be sure to check out the restored, hand-painted version) fantasy follows a premise that would serve as a staple of sci-fi adventure movies for over a century: people embark on a journey and the shit falls With its long theatrical shots and flat compositions, the film's primitive nature is apparent, but Méliès makes up for it with charm. Modern viewers instinctively know how to spot basic camera tricks, especially when the perspective and scale aren't right. Méliès, however, understood his limitations, embraced artifice and, with that moon face holding a rocket to his eye, created something iconic.—Jeremy Mathews

99Antivirus(2012)

Director:Brandon Cronenberg

When you're the son of David Cronenberg, you have a lot to live up to in a horror movie debut, and Brandon Cronenberg does an admirable job in his gross, cerebral horror flick.Antivirus. While it can be a bit slow and portentous, the setting and ideas are spectacular. The film imagines a sci-fi world in the near future where obsession with celebrity life has superseded almost every other facet of the arts. People are so obsessed with celebrities, in fact, that a thriving business of genetics has developed to cater to disease hunters, people who literally want to be injected with specific strains of diseases, like STDs, that have been harvested. of several stars. Elsewhere, people line up at meat markets to buy farmed, cultured muscle tissue from famous donors. Cronenberg may go a bit overboard with the social commentary, but the results on screen are terrifying. Cronenberg creates a scenario that you can never get out of your head. —he told them

98.Alfaville(1965)

Director:Jean-Luc Godard

Sci-fi isn't particularly suited to Godard's gaze—so erratic and ironic, so uninterested in the demands and quirks of worldbuilding is the legendary French director—but there's no better visionary for attacking the mind, either. fuck this bizarre adventure of Lemmy Caution.Alfavilleit is both experimental noir and speculative fiction, steeped in the tropes of the former while toying with the world of the latter, never justifying hybridization of the two but never caring about either. As such, the pulpy story of a secret agent (Eddie Constantine) who is sent to the "galaxy" of Alphaville to assassinate, among others, the creator of artificial intelligence (Alpha 60) who controls all facets of Alphavillian society by banning virtually all emotions - while falling in love with the inventor's daughter (Godard's muse, Anna Karina) - is as silly as it is convincing, totally committed to the self-consciously confused premise, like most of Godard's films, of the jumps that are required of the audience to follow the winding plot. Saturated with anachronism and stylized to the point of parody,Alfavilleis not interested in plunging the viewer into a dystopian not-too-distant future, but rather in exposing science fiction as a genre that requires us to dramatically reconceptualize everything we take for granted about the genre: language, humanity, and a future that at least I will understand.—Sinacola House

97.barbarella(1968)

Director:roger vadim

barbarellaIt was a one-of-a-kind film when it came out in 1968, and it's still something highly unusual now as it celebrates its 50th anniversary: ​​a mix of science fiction, fantasy, and erotica that plays all three at once cheesy and blunt, depending on the mood. . Appropriately, then, Jane Fonda's Barbarella is a young space harpy trained in the "art of love," but she's also somewhat naive with no real-world experience. The film's sets, costumes, and production design garnered attention upon its initial release, being fabulously exuberant and colorful, creating a gothic yet raunchy grandeur in space, and featuringspace riotFor starters, it's John Philip Law. YeahbarbarellaInitially marketed with a vague promise of defined emotion, these artistic flourishes turned out to be most influential to the next generation of '70s sci-fi.barbarellaIt'll probably never earn the respect it deserves, but many B-movies of its era can be pointed to to attest to the lasting impact it had on exploitation movies and the darker corners of sci-fi.—Jim Vorel

96.Sleeping(1973)

Director:Woody Allen

SleepingWoody Allen's sci-fi comedy lives up to the legendary filmmaker's powers. Miles Monroe (Allen), as a man cryogenically thawed out of time, is recruited into an underground resistance movement against a tyrannical robot-enhanced police state. (In the current political climate, his foreknowledge seems strange but obvious.) What follows is a precise physical comedy,Hilarious Allen-style quotesand some hilarious banter (not to mention the incomparably talented Diane Keaton) permeating America's dystopian future of 2173. Fortunately for Miles, the police state of the future is evidently more incompetent than he is. I wish we were that lucky today.—Scott Wold

95.brother from another planet(1984)

Director:Juan Sayles

During the 1980s, John Sayles established himself as a savvy freelance writer/director with a knack for social commentary, but only one of his movies incorporated such commentary into a wacky sci-fi plot. The result is the story of a mute alien who looks like a black man with strange feet, who crash-lands in Harlem and meets and watches the people of New York City. Joe Morton gives a stellar silent performance that, like the movie itself, seamlessly transitions from comedic to empathetic.—Jeremy Mathews

94.distant land(1981)

Director:pedro hyams

Two years laterForeign, Peter Hyams exploited the blue-collar subtext of Ridley Scott's dirty mining ship politics to remakeMiddayin the space. In perhaps his noblest role, Sean Connery stars as U.S. Marshal William O'Niel, a strict do-gooder assigned the duty of leading a motley crew of titanium ore miners who inhabit a station on the moon Io. from Jupiter. Like any flourishing colony on the fringes of civilization, law and order automatically succumbs to any criminal hierarchy that provides the necessary vices to keep workers from slipping into utter madness, but no one told O'Niel. Principled and still reeling from the sudden departure of his wife and son, fed up with too many assignments to shitty outposts far from an Earth his son has never seen, O'Niel decides to take on alone the evil confederation of capitalists who already saturates society. slowly emerging on Io, led by fawning corporate chief Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle). From there, Hyams stages a tense showdown between O'Niel and the bureaucratic assassins sent to teach him what's what (i.e. kill him), leading to a fatal game of cat and mouse in which O'Niel is Outnumbered though, the tight quarters and relentless vacuum of space can work in your favor. Rather than relegate exploration of the cosmos to only the elite, Hyams (with directors like Scott and John Carpenter) serves as a cinematic tributary to the proletariat, knowing that what awaits us off-planet is no escape from the institutionalized suffering of the majority. We. on Earth, but a continuation of this human tragedy in a much stranger and more unforgiving environment. The more we need to find a way to survive this world, our world, the more we have to accept what we can't leave behind.—Sinacola House

93.Nine days(2021)

Director:edson room

In a small house, alone in the desert, Will (Winston Duke) watches.Nine days, the hard-hitting film debut from writer-director Edson Oda, understands that we are a voyeuristic existence. We are only truly living to the fullest when we can see, share,To feelthe experiences of others. Will is something of a hiring manager for life. As painful as it is for him to accept (he obviously liked his previous choices), there's a new opening, and there are a few applicants. Over the course of a nine-day process, almost like an audition for a reality show, especially fitting considering that the plane they would be leaving behind is the home of an observer who carefully and compassionately watches a televised wall of literal life streams, Will and his friend/worker colleague Kyo (Benedict Wong) narrow down the candidates to find the person best suited for the gift of mundane existence. Oda's gripping, tight-knit metaphysical sci-fi drama about the end and beginning of life, and all the wonders that can be shared between them, is the most moving debut you'll see all year. First, it takes a lot of creativity to try and tackle such an ambitious, heady, and easily hackneyed subject. Second, it takes great storytelling talent, both in crafting the script and managing the actors, to overcome these obstacles and keep the dignity of everyone involved intact.Nine daysit has a quiet confidence, it's written in the way the best science fiction is, where it feels like a massive text that's been erased down to even the most basic elements necessary for a perceptive imagination to rebuild itself: a painting of overwhelming sentiment. portrayed with the simplest strokes possible. Oda's script was viewed with similar restraint, almost contained within Will's home and his canvases before slowly moving beyond those confines. But, at least at first, Will wannabes including Tony Hale, Bill Skarsgård, David Rysdahl, Arianna Ortiz and last-minute Zazie Beetz are stuck in a rut. As the would-be humans continue to prove themselves through a series of psychological tests, their growth or stagnation measured in compellingly contained segments overseen by Duke's stoic and compassionate pastor, we become as invested as Will in his perspectives. . The gravity of what they're looking for hits us. The ultra-sincere Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jonze (Jonze executive producer of the film) premise goes beyond the high concept of him and begins to delve into the emotional nuances of him. Scene after scene of appreciation for life's magical moments hits our hearts. Few times have movies softened it with such tenderness. It can be terribly bittersweet, even without the soaring strings of Antonio Pinto's score, and when they do appear, it's not even fair. Admirably ambitious and exhilaratingly sincere,Nine daysleaves you raw and renewed.Nine daysmarks Oda as one of our most exciting new directors, a filmmaker who possesses an innovative cinematic mind with a heart to match.—Jacob Oller

92.the immensity of the night(2020)

Director:andres patterson

the immensity of the nightit's the kind of sci-fi movie that sinks into your deep memory and feels like something you heard on the news, saw in a dream, or heard in a bar. Director Andrew Patterson's small-town paean to analog and aliens is built from long speaking takes and fast-paced sequences of manipulative technology. Effectively a 1950s two-way game between audio enthusiasts (Sierra McCormick and Jake Horowitz playing a switchboard operator and deejay, respectively), the film is a padded fable layered with stories, anecdotes, and conversation piled high and high. interlocked before tearing off the covers. . The effectiveness of the dusty place and its inhabitants, forged from a high school basketball game and one-sided phone conversations (the latter being perfect examples of McCormick's confident performance and crisp script from writers James Montague and Craig W. Sanger), it just makes their inevitable desert UFO destination even better. Comfort and friendship come with a nonchalant swagger and a torrent of words, which makes sensory silence (silence to focus on a frequency or abandon the visual to focus on a single, mysterious radio caller) almost sacred. It's mythology at its finest, an origin story that makes alien haunting feel as natural and a part of our curious lives as its many social snapshots. The beautiful ode to all things that go [unintelligible hum] at night is a standalone inspiration for future Fox Mulders everywhere.—Jacob Oller

91.Paddy(2009)

Director:duncan jones

First-time director Duncan Jones talks openly about his stylistic appropriations of Stanley Kubrick2001: A Space Odyssey, to the overwhelming orchestral music that frames the opening scenes of the titular satellite and the Earth. Yet where Kubrick addressed existential fears about human extinction and the future of civilization, Jones hypothesizes the logical conclusion to this bleak vision: a world where the need for more energy has turned humanity into a manufactured cog. by multinational corporations whose reach now extends beyond the world. limits of the Earth. The film's plot revolves around Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), the only human at a lunar mining facility collecting helium-3, a clean fuel that could meet Earth's growing energy demand in the near future. Basic computer system GERTY (Kevin Spacey) is his only partner on the three-year mission to look after Sam, as a supposed satellite failure means he can only send and receive pre-recorded messages. When an accident nearly kills Sam, a clone of himself saves him and begins to unravel the sinister nature of the base and its existence.PaddyIt largely cradles the throwback look of 1960s and '70s sci-fi for its sanitized, claustrophobic portrayal of the moon base, but this high-tech visual treat is just the backdrop to a larger morality story about position. diminishing number of humanity in a technologically saturated world. society. When the human experience can be synthesized (and therefore discarded), is there such a thing as "humanity"? There are a host of challenging philosophical threads running throughout (cloning, masculinity, energy, corporate power), but these individual themes complement rather than absorb the larger narrative.Paddyis a superlative example of science fiction that addresses the roots of the genre: social commentary on the human condition, without the easy catharsis of over-the-top special effects and space opera. It's the ultimate rarity in modern cinema: mature, engaging, and thoughtful sci-fi, and proof that there's still life in the genre.—Michael Saba

90.galaxy mission(1999)

Director:Reitor Parisot

galaxy missionit is a film about the balance between love and parody; a movie made with less of the former and too much of the latter becomes a small dip into sci-fi fandom, and a movie made backwards becomes much more about fan service than honest storytelling. Dean Parisot, aided and encouraged by writers David Howard and Robert Gordon, strikes the perfect balance between the two andgalaxy missionit comes across as a sci-fi adventure film that embraces its genre as enthusiastically as it pokes fun at its tropes. You don't do this kind of affectionate satire on yourself carelessly. After all, it's not that sci-fi fans can't handle a little immersion, but only a true sci-fi fan knows where to draw the line.

So Parisot, Howard and Gordon must be true sci-fi fans. as much asgalaxy missionhe chooses the conventions of his class and of people who worship science fiction with as much reverence as the average Baptist praises Jesus, is based on an abiding fondness forday in the stars: To phasers, to warp drives, to teleportation, to holograms, to strange alien races, to all the other sci-fi textbook clichés that make us groan but without which we know we can't we could live (What's a good sci-fi movie without a hot-headed, macho commander making questionable strategic decisions that somehow work?) This one is for sci-fi fans. And if you're not a sci-fi fan, it could be the movie that makes you one.—Andy Crump

89.the hidden(1987)

Director:jack shoulder

Although John CarpenterThe thingplunged the then terrifyingly mysterious AIDS crisis into supernatural horror five years earlier,the hiddenit indulges in similar tropes and identical themes with more forceful and no less tainted chaos. Los Angeles detective Thomas Beck (Michael Nouri) must reluctantly work with FBI Special Agent Gallagher (Kyle Maclachlan, who practically plays a proto-Dale Cooper) to get to the bottom of a series of mind-bending, violent murders that captivate. to normal, educated citizens. . - only to discover, when it's too late, that the culprit is an alien slime parasite transmitted orally from one host to another, giving each unfortunate husk superhuman vulnerability and a nihilistic streak of evil. The scientific fiction of the end of two years 80 many times succumbed to the cynicism of an overcommercialized zeitgeist, sold to corporate America and the Reagan government's response to all the social crises to the quaisquer death sentence, the good vibrations that speculative fiction has ever offered, more withthe hidden- violent and brutal in its own right - came, in the final moments of the film, a gesture of sacrifice and genuine compassion unusual for a genre film of this type. Or, at least, that's one way to interpret it.—Sinacola House

88.Western world(1973)

Director:Michael Crichton

long before there wasJurassic Park(or the increasingly frustratingWestern worldHBO series, by the way), Michael Crichton wrote (and directed) the story of another theme park disaster: Delos, home to the sophisticated android entertainment characters of Westworld, Medievalworld, and Romanworld. After catastrophic failures inevitably occur, some guys who enjoy Dude Time find themselves truly threatened when robotic "bad boy" Gunslinger's security measures go down. And a decade ago there wasterminator, there was Yule Brenner's relentless robot-chaser, a mindless killing machine that looks exactly like Brenner's heroic character fromThe seven magnificents. Don't bother trying to melt his face, Peter (Richard Benjamin); existmuch more where that came from."Wow, we have a vacation for you!" she promises the park ads. They weren't wrong.—Scott Wold

87.Independence Day(1996)

Director:roland emmerich

They hardly make action movies likeIndependence Daymore, although if you ask someone who tookIndependence Day: Resurgence, they'll say that's probably a good thing. Regardless, there's a certain sheen to this particular brand of FX-powered pre-2000s blockbuster disaster, a gravitas of conviction in terms of clear characters like Jeff Goldblum's "David Levinson"; call it a willingness to believe that the public will be 100 percent on board. with a protagonist from the beginning instead of questioning his methods. As for the rest of the cast, we have a who's who of '90s delights, be it the up-and-comer Will Smith, a year earlier.men in blackwould cement it as main material, or Bill Pullman as America's pilot, ready to deliver one of cinema's best chauvinistic speeches.Independence Daydoes not shy away from its pulp-like inspirations (might as well be a remake ofearth vs flying saucersas far as extraterrestrial motivations go), but graces its Saturday morning cartoon story with an undeniably ambitious spectacle, even when viewed more than 20 years later. That White House blast, not to mention Goldblum and Smith's effortless camaraderie in all of their scenes together, cementsIndependence Dayamong the most watched sci-fi action movies of the last two decades.—Jim Vorel

86.silent race(1971)

Director:douglas trumbull

A precursor of bothpared-emiPaddy,silent racewas the first feature film directed by Douglas Trumbull, the special effects wizard best known for his work on2001: A Space Odyssey,Close Encounters of the Third KindmiThe Tree of Life. Set on a spaceship hovering around Saturn, this meditative film is about an interstellar greenhouse caretaker named Freeman Lowell (Bruce Dern), who watches over Earth's last remaining forests and wildlife. When Lowell is instructed to destroy his payload and return to Earth, he refuses, deciding to fake an accident and pilot his ship to the furthest reaches of space, where he and his live payloads will be safe from human interference. Ecologically conscious, narratively simple, deeply moving,silent raceIt's one of those great lost gems of 1970s sci-fi.—Tim Grierson

85.Strange Days(1995)

Director:kathryn bigelow

Before reinventing herself as the director of award-winning docudramas, Kathryn Bigelow made a name for herself directing outlandish films likealmost darkmiBreaking point. With all due respect toBreaking point, Nevertheless,Strange Daysit remains Bigelow's most compelling pre-war project on terrorism. Written by Bigelow's ex-husband, James Cameron, and Oscar-nominated screenwriter Jay Cocks,Strange Daysis a pulpy noir-influenced sci-fi film in the vein ofRewarded accommodationbut with more high-octane action and a lot more nudity. Set in the era of the Rodney King beatings and the Los Angeles riots, the film is set in a dystopian Los Angeles where people's memories and experiences are recorded directly from their brains to be sold on the black market. Anyone who has ever wanted to try criminal activity or kinky sexual encounters can now do so without repercussions. Trouble begins when assistant detective-turned-black drug dealer Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) discovers a "snuff" record describing the brutal murder of an acquaintance. This record takes you down an urban underground rabbit hole. Running at nearly two and a half hours, the film's visual pyrotechnics and beautifully stylized performances provide more than enough ammunition to justify such excess.—Mark Roseman

84. Snow Driller (2013)

Director:Bong Joon Ho

There is a sequel halfwayperforanievesthat perfectly articulates what makes Korean writer/director Bong Joon-ho one of the most dynamic filmmakers working today. Two armies engage in a set of limitless action and heavy slow motion. Metal collides with metal, and characters slash at their opponents as if their bodies were made of butter. It's gory, imaginative, gruesome, beautiful, visceral, and utterly glorious. Adapted from a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette,perforanievesis a science fiction thriller set in a futuristic, post-apocalyptic world. Nearly two decades earlier, in a reckless attempt to stop the global wake-up call, the government flooded the atmosphere with an experimental chemical that turned our planet into an ice-covered barren desert. Now, what is left of humanity resides in the "Snowpiercer", a huge train powered by a perpetual motion motor. Needless to say, this scenario didn't exactly bring out the best in humanity. Bong's dark and brutal film may very well be playing a song we've all heard before, but it does it with such gusto and skill that you can't help but get caught up in the flood.mark roseman

83.black city(1998)

Director:Alex Proyas

Alex Proyas' masterpiece delivers a cerebral sci-fi extravaganza, filtered through the visual tropes of film noir and German expressionism. An impressive achievement in the imagination,black city, as a clear predecessorRewarded accommodation, flopped at the box office only to be revived later as a beloved cult classic. The film casts Rufus Sewell as amnesiac John Murdoch, who wakes up one night to discover that his town is (literally) under the manipulation of a group of eerily pale men in black coats and fedoras. Along for the ride is Kiefer Sutherland as a mad scientist and Jennifer Connelly as the femme fatale, our hero's ex-wife.

A straight line can also be drawn between it andMatrix, released a year later. The similarities between the visual styles of the two films and the themes of slavery, techno-rebellion, and free will are almost impossible to miss, andmany visual essaysthey were specifically written to compare the two films. John Murdoch's arc is only slightly less portentous than the one prophesied (Keanu Reeves) inMatrix- both are seemingly normal men, trapped and thrown into a web of slowly unraveling secrets, while discovering that they possess special powers that will eventually allow them to defeat the puppeteers who created their reality. The two films were largely shot at the same studio, Fox Studios Australia, and have a similar patina of green-tinged unreality. By last,black cityIt's a little more philosophically beyond chewing on popcorn, easier to understand.Site, so probably the latter ended up becoming a cultural reference. Butblack cityIt deserves to be watched, both on its own merits and as an exercise to see which of his visions might have lodged in the Wachowskis' minds, waiting to be reborn in next year's blockbuster.—Mark Rozeman and Jim Vorel

82.THERE. Artificial intelligence(2001)

Director:steven spielberg

AI.may be Spielberg's misunderstood masterpiece, as evidenced by many critics who pointed out its supposed flaws only to come to a new understanding of its greatness, chief among them Roger Ebert, who ultimately included it as one of hisgreat moviesten years after giving you onetepid first review.AI.represents the perfect blend of Spielberg and Stanley Kubrick's sensibilities, as Kubrick reportedly worked on the story with Spielberg, and Spielberg felt compelled to finish it after Kubrick's death, allowing the film to keep each of them at bay. your worst instincts. It's not as cold or detached as Kubrick's films tend to be, but it's not as cheesy and manipulative as Spielberg's films can be, and before the ending is held up as proof of Spielberg's failure, it should be noted that the The film's obscure coda was actually Kubrick's. . idea, firm that the end does not interfere more than any other scene. Closer inspection of the film's subjects reveals a much darker conclusion, and no, they're not "aliens." —Oktay Ege Kozak

81.Beginning(2010)

Director:Christopher Nolan

In movie history, there isn't a more groan-inducing twist than the "it was all a dream" trope (notable exceptions likeThe Wizard of Ozapart, apart). WithBeginning, director Christopher Nolan creates a thrilling, high-octane piece of sci-fi drama in which that concept is not just a plot device, but the entirety of the story. The measured, ever-steady pace and precision with which plot and imagery unfold, and Wally Pfister's stunning local cinematography spanning Nolan's world, imply an almost obsessive attention to detail. The movie ends and unfolds like a mechanical beast, every little extra minutiae coming together to form a towering whole. Nolan's cinema andBeginnings dream research works with the same goal: to offer us a simulation that plays with our notions of reality. So, and like a summer popcorn movie,Beginningis admirably successful, leaving behind images and memories that tug and twist our perceptions, challenging us to ask ourselves if we're thinking about this at all, or if we're only partially remembering a waking dream.

Director Andrei Tarkovsky has written a book about his philosophy towards cinema, calling itcarving in time; Nolan doesn't sculpt, he deconstructs. He uses the cinema to separate time and reassemble it at will. A spiritual person, Tarkovsky's films were an expression of poetic transcendence. For Nolan, a rationalist, he wants to cheat time, cheat death. His films often avoid facing death head-on, though they certainly represent it. What Nolan is best able to convey is the weight of time and how ephemeral and feeble our understanding of existence is. Time is constantly running out in Nolan's movies; the ticking of the clock is a recurring motif, which his former collaborator Hans Zimmer has translated aurally into the scores ofInterstellarmiTherefore. Nolan rebels against temporal reality, and cinema is his weapon, his tool, the paradoxical ladder or mirror upon mirror ofBeginning. He conceives and designs filmic structures that emphasize the crisis of time and, at the same time, provide a way of escape. In itBeginningThere are different layers within the dream world, and the deeper you delve into the subconscious, the more extensive your mental experience of time becomes. If one could dig deep enough, they could live a virtual eternity in the bottomless pit of their own minds. "To sleep, maybe to dream": the closest Nolan came to touching an afterlife.—Michael Saba and Chad Betz

80.ghost in the shell(1995)

Director:mamoru oshii

It is difficult to exaggerate the size of the influence.ghost in the shellit exerts not only on the cultural and aesthetic evolution of Japanese animation, but on the shape of science fiction cinema as a whole in the 21st century. Whenghost in the shellFirst debuted in Japan, it was hailed as nothing short of a tour de force that would later garner an immense cult following when it was released in the United States. The film drew praise from directors like James Cameron and the Wachowski brothers (whose turn-of-the-century cyberpunk classicMatrixis philosophically indebted to the path opened by the Oshii precedent).

Adapted from Masamune Shirow's original 1989 manga, the film is set in the mid-21st century, a world inhabited by cyborgs in artificial prosthetic bodies, in the fictional Japanese metropolis of Niihama.ghost in the shellfollows the story of Major Motoko Kusanagi, commander of a national special operations task force known as Public Security Section 9, who begins to question the nature of her own humanity surrounded by a world of artificiality. When Motoko and her team are assigned to stop the mysterious Puppeteer, an elusive hacker considered one of the most dangerous criminals on the planet, they are chasing a series of crimes perpetrated by the Puppeteer's unwitting pawns before seemingly unrelated events coalesce into a pattern. that revolves around one person: the Elder herself.

All aboutghost in the shelldeep, refined screams, from the ruined markets and claustrophobic corridors inspired by the imagery of the Kowloon Walled City, to the sound design, evident in Kenji Kawai's lugubrious soundtrack, to the resounding thud of every bullet fired. shoot at the screen. Oshii took Shirow's source material and arguably surpassed it, transforming an already heady sci-fi action drama into a proto-Kurzweilian fable about the rise of artificial intelligence.ghost in the shellis more than the cornerstone of cyberpunk fiction, it is a story about what it means to create oneself in the digital age, a time when the concept of truth seems as fickle as the web is vast and endless.—Toussaint Egan

79.District 9(2009)

Director:Neill Blomkamp

Let's start with a number: 30 million. This is how much money Neill Blomkamp spent to makeDistrict 9, a film small in scale but large in ambition, appears to have cost four times as much. Years later, Blomkamp's career did not live up to all the promise shown inDistrict 9, but here, it looks like a guy knows what he's doing anyway. A mixed gender stew of various measures ofalien nation,watermelon man,Independence Day,The flightmirobocop,District 9traverses familiar territory in an unfamiliar location, through an unfamiliar lens, blending documentary-style with stomach-churning body horror and, in the end, a cutting-edge action spectacle.

Nine years ago, the end results of Blomkamp's madcap sci-fi cocktail looked revealing. They're Let Down Today, a look at what might have been and where his career might have taken him if he hadn't gotten lost in the swamp ofElysiumor turned off even his most devoted followers withmy uncle. All the same,District 9it is still an important work for a beginner, or even for a third party, polished and yet disjointed at the same time; the film is about an artist who has something to say and says it with electric urgency.—Andy Crump

78.attack the block(2011)

Director:joe cornwall

Written and directed by Joe Cornish, the sci-fi action comedy centers on a gang of teenage bullies, particularly their disgruntled leader Moses, noticeably underappreciated by a young John Boyega, and his south London housing project. When the defiant teens take their crime to a new level and assault an innocent nurse (a lovely Jodie Whittaker), they are immediately beset by alien invaders. These hideous creatures, with their black fur and bright blue fangs, want nothing more than to destroy the children and their block of flats.

In the spirit of Spielberg, even more than J.J. Spielberg's ode to Abrams from the same year,Super 8—Cornish uses extraterrestrial beings as catalysts to bring supernatural redemption to a person and a community. She focuses specifically on the lower socio-economic half of London and the turmoil that surrounds them, exposing the lies that society's youth believe to prolong cultural discontinuity. A comedic scene, in which Moses tries to make sense of the aliens while making excuses for his criminal behavior, cleverly highlights this: he doesn't just blame the government for the violence and drugs in his neighborhood, he blames the government for everything. foreign thing invasion.

Cornish, however, not only confronts this desperate attitude, but points to hope, most vividly in the way Moses fights the aliens, his fight exultant with the symbolic implications. Although he tries to escape the beasts by running and dodging, he realizes that he must inevitably face them, but not alone. In itattack the block, the alien invasion becomes a giant metaphor for the darkness that unites Moses, his friends and his bloc, a threat that can only be countered with the fundamental power of the community.—Maryann KoopmanKelly

77.Upstream(2012)

Director:Shane Carruth

de Shane CarruthUpstreambuilds an impressive mosaic of lives overwhelmed by decisions beyond their control, of people who do not understand the impulses that govern all their actions. Told with stylistic bravado and minimal dialogue (none in the last 30 minutes), the film continually finds new ways to evoke unexpected feelings. Visuals, from stunning shots of underwater shale to microscopic photographs, combine with extraordinary sound design and rhythmic cuts to create a hypnotic portrayal of the intertwining narratives of history. The medium for interconnectivity is a tiny worm whose parasitic endeavors unite lives, but Carruth doesn't mind exposing science fiction. The organism does what it does, and that is all we need to know. This allows more time to explore the emotional impact the organism has on the characters. Ultimately, that's whereUpstreamsuccess. An elaborate intellectual concept fuels the film, but a rich sense of humanity gives it strength.—Jeremy Matthews

76.tron(1982)

Director:Steven Lisberger

In a movie where computer programmers, so-called "users", are revered like gods, no one really programs much. It's understandable: in the early 1980s some mind-blowing technology, previously reserved for academics and elites, was introduced to the masses, and it all seemed like magic. by Steven Lisbergertronhe writes that fear into his code, building a world inside a computer as a theocracy (populated by "programs" that live their existence fulfilling a single function) ruled by religious oppression. Divinity is the power-hungry AI MCP (Master Control Program) who, foreshadowing James Cameronterminator of the futuremovies, he intends to surpass his human progenitors, the deified users, to take over the "real" world, making sinister moves like breaking into the Pentagon and Kremlin and then being a cocky jerk about it. Kind engineer Flynn (Jeff Bridges) wants only credit for the video game he created, which turned ENCOM, the company he co-founded as MCP's ancestor, into an international giant before his partner (David Warner) plagiarized him and kicked him out of business. the top. of the corporate ladder. Infiltrating the ENCOM building to try to uncover evidence of the betrayal, Flynn, just as upset as the MCP, is scanned, sucked into the company's computer network via a laser (housed in "Laser Bay 1", according to the buttons). of the elevator). ), where he, disguised as a program, discovers how fascist coding can be. And, like Neo inMatrix, Flynn discovers he can manipulate the fabric of that reality, taking on his new almost mystical role with gusto, then opting for a fully robed Jedi, bathed in beatific neon light for 2010.Tron: Legacy. “All that is visible must grow beyond itself and extend into the realm of the invisible,” says Dumont (Barnard Hughes), an oracular figure and the closest the film gets to a digital priest.tron, and much of science fiction, is a sign of how spiritually charged this growth can be.—Sinacola House

75.Pi(1998)

Director:darren aronofsky

Pifeels like an 85 minute migraine. It's something good.

Darren Aronofsky, American master of the cinematographic wave, aptly begins with a film that takes us inside the head of a man on the verge of a mental collapse. For this boy, a math genius named Max Cohen (Sean Gullette), who earned his Ph.D. at age 20 and spends his days crunching numbers in a dingy New York apartment, the world is one big equation to solve. Applying a mind fast enough to multiply 322 by 491 in a fraction of a second, Max aims to unlock the patterns of the universe: the symmetries, recursions, and ratios that will allow him, among other things, to predict the trajectory of the stock market. . , which he sees as an organism that obeys natural laws. For him, this quest is to push technology and the human body further than ever before and, as is often the case with most science fiction that explores the edge of understanding, of a new reality, of a cocky nature. , although other parties intend to exploit his brain for different reasons. A group of Wall Street bigwigs wants to buy his stock data for profit, while a group of Hasidic Jews seek his help in deciphering the Torah, which they believe involves deciphering the numerical base of the Hebrew language. As external interference and, above all, internal drive push Max past the brink of collapse,Piit seems on the verge of disintegrating with it, so close is it to man's subjective experience.

To do this, the film shows us the things a mentally hallucinated Max does: a singing subway passenger, a man with a bloody hand, and, most impressively, a disembodied brain that literalizes the film's very status as an externalization. from the mind of your protagonist. These dreamlike visions imbue the film with a nightmarish aura that evokes the surrealism of David Lynch. properly,PiThe most obvious Lynchian ancestor isrubber head, given the black-and-white aesthetic of Aronofsky's film, the otherworldly aura, the slimy imagery, the seductive character next door, and the grating soundtrack courtesy of Clint Mansell, whose hellish soundscape brilliantly evokes what it can sound like. the buzz if set to 11.

Three times throughout the film, Max recounts a childhood incident in which his mother told him not to look at the sun. She did it anyway and damaged her eyesight as a result. The most obvious point of reference here is the myth of Icarus, the classic warning against unbridled ambition, explicitly mentioned elsewhere in the film, but also evoked in Plato's "Allegory of the Cave", which tells of an underground prisoner. who, created to believe that shadows cast on a wall were the original Things themselves, is freed from ignorance and allowed to step into the light. In this story, the liberated man is blinded by sunlight after spending his life in darkness, but with Max, what is unclear is whether the sun is a transcendent truth or whether the fire of his own obsession obstructs the clarity you tried. very difficult. reach.—Jonah Jeng

74.Looper(2012)

Director:Rian Johnson

Joseph-Gordon Levitt channels his inner badass to play the younger version of Bruce Willis, nailing (with the help of some CGI and prosthetics) Willis' omnipresent action presence. The best case made in a movie for "If time travel is banned, only outlaws can time travel!", writer-director Rian Johnson wisely treats technology as a given, focusing on the dramatic scenarios that would create human use. The result is one of the most exciting time travel movies of decades, and an obvious reason Johnson was entrusted with one.Star Warsmovie soon after.—Christian Becker

73.the truman show(1998)

Director:peter landfill

The delicious and hilarious work of Peter Weirthe truman showit would no longer be done. It's a star-studded event film centered on a simple, dystopian premise: Jim Carrey's eponymous character was unknowingly raised from birth as a reality star and has only now begun to suspect that everyone in his life is a contract actor. Carrey's insightful performance is a far cry from the outlandish roles that catapulted him to fame a few years earlier, though, as was often the case with Carrey's roles in the '90s, it takes a fair amount of special effects work to create a believable simulation. reality for Carrey's endearing everyman to get trapped inside. The heartfelt monologues and devastating revelations as he fights to escape his gilded cage shine through all the more. The struggle to escape the control, of a sanitized and curated existence dictated by a literally white-in-the-sky father figure sounds alarming two decades later, when social media turned us all into performative brand managers. Truman is an unlikely and often unlucky hero in his own story, but his eventual hijacking of his own narrative, and his ultimate challenge to the literal and figurative figure of his creator, forms one of the most heroic movie arcs of the last 20 years. .—Kenneth Lowe

72.The Chronicles of Riddick(2004)

Director:david doshy

Space Opera. So easy to discard but, as with many of the pulpy candies of the imagination, so hard to obtain.na medira.Fifth Elementit works.Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planetsfails (althoughsolowrong). The sequel to David Twohy and Vin Diesel'sshortYet it's cooked to perfection, with dialogue tinged with noir and angst, personal and planetary existential threats, bizarre events, and quirky characters all seriously presented.The Chronicles of Riddickit avoids exposition overload, though it manages to sneak in a lot of world-building as our titular Furian kicks the antagonist's butt from one scene to the next. In a way, the series as a whole can be compared to theForeignFranchise: The first horror film, the second action-only, the third, well, less exciting, but the second film in the series stands as one of the purest and most enjoyable encapsulations of Lucas's alien space opera.—Michael Burgin

71.good(2017)

Director:Bong Joon Ho

goodit takes more creative risks in its first five minutes than most movies do in their entire span, and it doesn't stop there. What seems to be a sticking point for some critics and audiences, particularly Western ones, is the seemingly erratic tone, from sentiment to suspense, fast-paced action, fantasy, horror, and what Jake Gyllenhaal is up to. But that's part and parcel of what makes Bong Joon-ho movies, well, Bong Joon-ho movies: they're subtle and complex, but they're not exactly subtle or restrained. They are imaginative works that create momentum through alternations between parts and counterparts, andgoodis perhaps the best example yet of the wild pendulum motion of a Bong movie's rhythmic key.

goodit is, in other words, the culmination of Bong's unique rhythms into something like a syncopated symphony. The film opens with Tilda Swinton's corporate expert, Lucy Mirando, launching an expository PR dump about her new genetically modified super pigs, which are set to revolutionize the food industry. We're also introduced to Johnny Wilcox, played by Gyllenhaal as a bunch of miserable tics, as if there's some very cool anime character waiting to shed his Gyllenhaal meat, but barely contained in the meantime. Okja is the ultimate super pig, raised by a Korean farmer (Byun Hee-bong) and his granddaughter Mija (Ahn Seo-hyun), an orphan. Okja is Mija's best friend, a crucial part of her family. Bong takes his sweet time with this idyllic life that Mija and Okja share. The narrative slows down to see what appears to be a Miyazaki fantasy come to life. Mija whispers in Okja's ear and we wonder what she could be saying. The grandfather lied to Mija, saying that he had saved money to buy Okja from the Mirando corporation. There is no way to buy this pig; is to be a promotional star for the company. When Johnny Wilcox comes to claim Okja (a sharp note of dissonance in the peaceful setting), Grandpa makes an excuse for Mija to accompany him to her parents' grave. It is there that he tells her the truth.

Mija's mission to rescue Okja leads her to ally with non-violent animal rights activists ALF, leading the film into an adventurous act where Bong's penchant for stage art is taken to new heights. The director works with a top-notch team led by one of our best living cinematographers, Darius Khondji, who composes every frame ofgoodwith vibrant virtuosity. The very action of the film becomes an action concerned with its own ethics. As the caricatures of certain characters increase, and the scope of the film stretches further and further towards surreal limits, one realizes that thegoodit is a modern and moral fable. It is not a movie about veganism, but it is a movie that questions how we can find wholeness and, above all, how we can act humanely towards other creatures, including humans. The answersgoodThe scopes are simple and vital, and without actually pronouncing them, they help you hear those answers for yourself because you've asked all the right questions, and you've asked them in an intensely engaging way.—Chad Betz

70.High life(2019)

Director:claire dennis

High lifeit begins with a moment of intense vulnerability, immediately followed by a moment of immense strength. We first glimpse a welcoming green garden, before moving on to a sterile room. There we learn that there is a baby alone while Monte (Robert Pattinson), perhaps her father, comforts her, speaking through a headset mounted on her space helmet. "Da da da," he explains over the intercom; the baby begins to lose his mind because he's not really there, he's perched out on the surface of his basic Lego spaceship piece, barely clinging to the edge of the darkness. They're in space, he's supposed to, surrounded by a dark, oppressive nothingness, and he can't reach it. They are alone. Monte then empties his cryogenic storage locker of all the corpses of his crewmates, turning their heavy limbs and torsos into space suits, not because it matters, but maybe just because it's something to do to pass the time, like a sign of respect and emotional. test of will Monte looks healthy and capable, as if he could handle all that loneliness, as if he and his daughter could really get away with anything.High lifehe lives within that juxtaposition, displaying tenderness as graphically as violence, anger, and incomprehensible fear, drawing out all that darkness around his characters for as much terror as writer-director Claire Denis can afford without being obvious about it. Pattinson, flat and agile, plays Monte remarkably, curled up inside himself to the point of finishing every word deep in his throat, his sentences at times completely meaningless. He doesn't let himself get much out of his face, but behind his eyes something creepy shines, like he might suddenly snap, and probably will. He tells this to Willow, her daughter, and whispers to her in her sleep that she could easily kill them both, not wanting to hurt her but still contaminating her dreams. He can't help it, and neither can Denis, who in her 14th film (the first in English) manages to make the public believe, as few directors do, thatnothingIt can happen. Madness springs from silence and sleep, bodily fluids dripping and splashing everywhere and saturating the psyche of these blue-collar criminal astronauts, the overwhelming stickiness of the film emphasizes how intimately close Denis wants us to feel to these strange and sick. bags of meat thrown at us. them. the limit of consciousness.—Sinacola House/full review

69.The man who fell to earth(1976)

Director: Nicholas Greek

Imbued with new poignancy and melancholy after the death of its mercurial Starman, David Bowie, Nicholas Roeg's ravenous, experimental impressionist masterpiece is one of those rare alien films that feels as exotic in its form as it does in its content. Replete with Roeg's characteristically discursive, paradoxically symmetrical yet non-linear, and violently sensual imagery,The man who fell to earthit is as much about subverting the very nature of the human experience as it is about offering an external window into our culture. Like the "secret but not private" Thomas Jerome Newton, a meteoric billionaire industrialist whose knowledge allows him to jump decades of scientific stranglehold in a mere moment, Bowie's version of a world traveler is less about misunderstanding the world than about a semantic confusion. the pronunciation of words, or the inability to reinforce his own externalized narrative. Even as Newton jumps every known scientific hurdle, his competitors and friends are so consumed by success that they are unable to see the big picture or recognize the importance of Newton's own interest in returning to his life. family.

Representing and replicating Roeg's movie-watching experience, Newton obsesses in front of dozens of televisions, collectively trying to view reality as a frozen experience. As he himself explains, “television shows everything, but it doesn't tell everything”. Moving through decades in individual frames, Newton cannot escape this misery of his own making, enjoying the death of memories of him in endless gins as he experiences multiple lives seemingly in a single event. Referring to his eternal imprisonment, Rip Torn traitor Nathan Bryce asks, "Are you mad we did this?" About to pass out, Newton replies, "We probably would have treated you the same if you'd come to our house." Even aliens are not immune to our vices of apathy and despair.—Michael Snydel

68.resuscitator(1985)

Director:stuart gordon

Ironically, the funniest version of H.P. Lovecraft is the least Lovecraftian. Stuart Gordon established himself as cinema's leading supernatural adapter with a juicy take on the story "Herbert West, Re-Animator," about a student who invents a disturbingly flawed means of bringing the dead back to life.resuscitatorit's more like a zombie flick than the auteur's brand of hidden sci-fi, but it boasts masterful thrillers, razor-sharp jokes, and Barbara Crampton as a smart and downright hot love interest. Jeffrey Combs as West establishes himself as the Anthony Perkins of his generation, a hilarious, brash and reckless genius that he would play in two.resuscitatorsequels (Combs even played Lovecraft in the anthology movieNecronomicón.)resuscitatorit's a near-perfect crystallization of the best aspects of '80s horror, reveling in both its perversion and its incredibly grotesque practical effects.—Curt Holman

67.cat(1997)

Director:andres nicholas

Less given to gadgets and special effects than to deeply felt characters, Andrew Niccol's 1997 film envisions a near future in which nearly all children are raised in a laboratory and genetically modified to avoid any mental "blemishes." or physical. Ethan Hawke stars as Vincent, a naturally conceived and therefore irrevocably flawed "son of God." To pursue his ambitious career dreams, Vincent seeks the help of a DNA broker and assumes a new, genetically superior identity. Archetypal in construction, the film uses a beautiful orchestral score by veteran composer Michael Nyman (the piano) to evoke a melancholic and reflective atmosphere, superimposed on the impeccable production design. All the visual elements of the film, from the color saturation to the sound design, help to immerse the viewer in an atmosphere, like those beings one semantic step away from being synthetic, at once familiar and completely foreign.— Kara Mansion

66.Evolution(2015)

Director:Lucile Hadžihalilović

Hadžihalilovic's beautiful enigma is anything and everything: creature feature, allegory, sci-fi, Lynch homage, feminist masterpiece, 80 minutes of absolute visceral sensation: it's an experience in itself, he refuses to explain what he wants, whatever it does, as long as the viewer understands whatever it is on some kind of subcutaneous level. In it, pre-teen boy Nicholas (Max Brebant) finds a dead body underwater, a starfish apparently sprouting from his belly button. Which would be strange if the child didn't live on a fatherless island of browless mothers who every night put their young children to bed with a squid ink-like concoction they call "medicine." This is the norm, until Nicolás's youthful curiosity begins to reveal a world of maturity that he is unable to fathom, discovering one night what mothers do when his supposed "sons" fall asleep. From there,Evolutioneviscerates notions of motherhood, masculinity, and the inexplicable gray area in between, evoking both anxiety and awe by presenting one unflinching and terrifying image after another.—Sinacola House

Sixty-five.twelve Monkeys(1995)

Director:Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam takes Chris Marker'soh pierand makes it darker. Starting in post-apocalyptic Philadelphia in 2035,twelve Monkeyshe glimpses the surface of Earth contaminated by a virus that forces the survivors to hide underground. Cole (Bruce Willis) must travel back to the 1990s to gather information on this deadly virus, but of course nothing goes as planned. As Cole questions his sanity, he must not only find a way to escape the mental institution in which he has been committed, but must also compete against fate to undo his final undoing. A melting pot of plot twists, excellent performances and environmentalism.twelve Monkeysmakes an indisputable case for inevitable human destruction.—Christian Becker

64.Contact(1997)

Director:Roberto Zemeckis

Contactfeels almost calculated like the kind of cerebral sci-fi to frustrate multiplex audiences with its overt, philosophical conclusion to "first contact," questioning whether something Jodie Foster's character experienced actually happened. Yet,Contactis a beautiful film about the struggle between the tangible and the ephemeral, between faith, intellect and ambition. Ellie (Foster) is a naturally likable and selfless woman who, on some level, seeks very personal validation by being chosen as humanity's representative to take on an alien race. The film challenges us to consider the depth of our inconsequential position in the universe and how different aspects of humanity, beautiful and hideous, would present themselves after the revelation of a "higher power." Add to this an impressive cast that includes Foster, John Hurt, James Woods, William Fichtner, Rob Lowe, Tom Skerritt, David Morse, and Matthew McConaughey (years before his McConaissance), and you can overlook Jake Busey's presence in one of the best examples of "hard science fiction" in the 1990s.—Jim Vorel

63.THX1138(1971)

Director:jorge lucas

The brilliance behind George Lucas's choice to discipline his dystopian society through android policemen is that there is little difference between the machines that keep the "peace" and the people for whom they keep it. Sort of like an over-the-top approach to Highway Patrol (think Village People, except much less singing) combined withGI JoeDexterous, the robotic police force is governed only by "the budget", which of course allows our hero THX (Robert Duvall) to escape from the underground society and the mysterious deity, OMM 0910, who suppresses him. However, when left to its own devices after OMM determines that going after THX would put the robotic police force 6% "over budget", even THX's humanity is further reduced to a matter of balancing numbers. It may be a triumphant point for our leading man, but in perhaps the most subtle thematic move the director has ever made, Lucas is hinting that even the organic characters inTHX1138they are mere tools for a higher power.—Sinacola House

62.the era of tomorrow(2014)

Director:Doug Liman

Commander William Cage (Tom Cruise) spends his days in the film's near-future setting, turning the military's ongoing efforts against a hostile alien race (nicknamed the Mimics) without ever setting foot on a battlefield. At least until a gruff general (Brendan Gleeson) sends him on a particularly risky mission. The result is Cage's death, but the story doesn't end there. Instead, Cage wakes up early on the day of his death with his memory intact and quickly learns that the resurrections will repeat each time he dies. His only hope of escaping the endless loop lies with super soldier Rita Vrataski (Emily Blunt), who knows from experience exactly how Cage can use this newfound ability to help humanity win the War of the Worlds.

Based on the mangaall you need is killby Hiroshi Sakurazaka and adapted for the screen by Christopher McQuarrie (Cruise's current director fully in sync with his physically challenging action spectacle) and Jez and John-Henry Butterworth,the era of tomorrowremember other notable time loop sagas includinggroundhog daymisource codein the witty and engaging way his story progresses piece by piece. As Cage relives the same day over and over again, he also learns how to become a true soldier, trains (and falls in love with) Rita, discovers how aliens work, and patiently formulates the perfect plan of attack. . As a video game hero with infinite lives, Cage has the opportunity to refine and correct every mistake he makes along the way. While Cage has been on this journey,the era of tomorrowis great, and Cruise handles the surprisingly entertaining action like a pro: his knack for deadpan comedy proves even more valuable than his infamous enthusiasm for repeatedly sacrificing his meat.—Geoff Berkshire

61.return of the jedi(1983)

Director:ricardo marquand

Look, I'm not here to defend the Ewoks. Actually, I'm not. But there is a certain subset ofStar Warsfans who deeply exaggerate their disconnection from Ewok. Yes, the little fluffballs probably could have been cut out of Episode VI entirely, but outside of them, the movie delivers the most incredible action sequences and epic conclusion of the entire series. So forget about the Ewoks for a moment and rate the movie on the rest of its merits.

It's all here: incredibly varied landscapes, from the grime of Jabba's palace to the brush of Endor to the cold, sparse steel of Imperial command ships. A fully grown Luke (Mark Hamill) shows that his powers have grown considerably, that he's not just chasing "delusions of grandeur" by rescuing Han (Harrison Ford). And then there's the actual introduction of Palpatine as the face of ultimate evil - is there any ruder way to introduce a character for the first time than Darth Vader, who we've personally witnessed choking several officers to death for trivial offenses? say: "The Emperor is not soindulgentlike me"? The space battle over Endor is the biggest the series has ever produced, and probably will produce (the only thing it comes close to is the conclusion ofa rogue); the sheer scale and dizzying choreography that ILM managed to pull off with practical effects in 1983 remains one of the most incredible visual effects feats in movie history. And the final confrontation between Luke, Vader, and the Emperor is the turning point of the entire trilogy arc: Luke's final test of both his Jedi determination and his deep belief in the spark of Anakin Skywalker that was left smoldering in the depth of Vader. The moment Luke throws down his lightsaber and declares himself "a Jedi, like my father before me," bringing a bitter frown to the emperor's crestfallen face, is an emotional triumph.—Jim Vorel

60avatar(2009)

Director:James Cameron

it makes sense thatavatarIt remains the highest-grossing film ever made - irony and insincerity have no place in its extended universe. Whether or not James Cameron intended to copy the world of Pandora and its futuristic inhabitants from virtually every fantasy text ever conceived is of little consequence, becauseavatarit is modern mythmaking in its most fundamental form. Cameron still seems to believe that "the movies" can give audiences a transformative experience, so every nerve in his film carries the herculean effort of truly great world-building, telling the simple story of Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) and hisdancing with Wolves- how to save the Na'vi, natives of the planet Pandora, from the destructive forces of colonialism. Cameron wants us to care about this world as much as Jake Sully and, by extension, James Cameron, creating flora and fauna with an almost sociopathic obsession, while pushing 3-D technology to its limits to bring his inhuman imagination to life. . It worked; "unobtanium" is actually a real thing. Four sequels seems like a sickening move for a man whose ambition has long outpaced his sense of storytelling, or his sense of reason, or his sense of what our oversaturated and over-entitled culture can handle. But Cameron has proven us wrong countless times before.—Sinacola House

59.Interstellar(2014)

Director:Christopher Nolan

Whether he's making superhero movies or blockbuster puzzle boxes, Christopher Nolan usually doesn't get carried away with emotion. ButInterstellaris a nearly three-hour ode to the interconnected power of love. It is also his personal attempt to do in 2014 what Stanley Kubrick did in 1968 with2001: A Space Odyssey, less an ode or homage than a challenge to Kubrick's highly polarizing contribution to the cinematic canon.Interstellarhe wants to lift us up with his visceral forces, weaving a myth about the great American sleeping spirit of invention. It is an ambitious paean to ambition itself. The film begins in the not too distant future, where drought, plague, and dust storms have turned the world into a regressive agrarian society. Textbooks cite the Apollo missions as frauds, and children are groomed to be farmers instead of engineers. This is a world where hope is dead, where spaceships sit on shelves collecting dust, and one that ex-NASA pilot Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) worries about. He has long been resigned to his fate, but is still appalled by humanity's failure to think beyond its galactic borders. But then Cooper becomes involved with a troop of NASA underground scientists, led by Professor Brand (Michael Caine), who plans to send a small team through a hole in the hole to explore three potentially habitable planets and ostensibly ensure their continued survival. human race. But the film succeeds more as a visual tour of the cosmos than as a true story. The rah-rah optimism of the film's pro-NASA stance is poignant, and in a way, this tribute to human effort keeps the whole story afloat. But no amount of scientific positivism can offset the weight of poetic repetition and platitudes about love.—Andy Crump

58.Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind(1984)

Director:Hayao Miyazaki

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Windis, quite simply, the film responsible for the creation of Studio Ghibli. This not only signaled Miyazaki's nascent status as one of anime's most prominent creators, but also sparked the birth of an animation studio whose creative output would dominate the medium for decades to come. After the release ofCastillo de Cagliostro, Miyazaki's bizarre adventure of Lupine III, the director was hired by his producer and future collaborator Toshio Suzuki to create a manga to better pitch a potential film to his employers at Animage. what resulted wasnausicaa, a sci-fi fantasy epic inspired by the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Jean "Moebius" Giraud, starring a fearless warrior princess who attempts to bridge the gap between humans and the forces of nature as she rises through of a post-apocalyptic wasteland. .

nausicaaIt was the film that introduced the world to the motives and themes for which Miyazaki would become universally known: a brave female protagonist who ignores and does not forgive gender norms, the ultimate power of compassion, the defense of the environment, and a love and unwavering fascination with the phenomenon. light off. He spawned a whole generation of animators, including Hideaki Anno, whose lauded work on the film's final climax would later inspire him to createNeon Genesis Evangelion. The essentiality ofNausicaä of the Valley of the WindIts placement within the larger canon of animated films, Japanese or otherwise, cannot be overstated.—Toussaint Egan

57.day in the stars(2009)

Director:JJ Abrams

JJ Abrams' film reboot of the Star Trek franchise is essentially a louder, flashier, and sexier version of the series regular '60s TV show. Sci-fi as social commentary, it's fairly faithful to the source material and features a top-notch cast.day in the starsit resurrects the idealistic flights of fantasy of pre-1970s sci-fi and offers us a compelling vision of what a multicultural (not to mention multicivilizational) utopian future might look like. Perhaps most importantly, this film takes a franchise that is seemingly indelibly marked with the scarlet letter of geekdom and gives it mass appeal.—Michael Saba

56.logan career(1976)

Director:miguel anderson

In the far future of 2274, 30 is the new 80. Unfortunately for those who believe they are entitled to a second act in life, like Logan 5 (Michael York), escaping could land them in the Gestapo-like Sandmen's "Deep Sleep." . And even if you manage to outmaneuver the human assassins, you can still take on a chrome grill with Box, the gorgeously melodramatic robot who ran out of space.fish! And plankton! And sea vegetables! And sea protein!, so he decided that he could quickly freeze some new corridors. I can't prove it, but I have a slight suspicion that Billy West modeled his performance on the Calculon robot fromFuturamaafter Roscoe Lee Browne's positively Shakespearean box set. "My birds! My birds!My birds!!—Scott Wold

55.men in black(1997)

Director:barry sonnenfeld

Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith have tremendous chemistry in what is essentially a buddy cop movie. But if the cocky young cop starts off sure of himself, Jones' Agent K whisks him away to an alien-infested Earth. Charming in tone, director Barry Sonnenfeld plays into all of our wildest conspiracy dreams, turning our everyday world into a secret haven for an imaginative array of creatures from planets beyond. The plot can be a bit limited, but the alien vignettes along the way are clever enough to bear the brunt.—Josh Jackson

54.minority report(2002)

Director:steven spielberg

The more we go online, the more any sense of personal privacy completely evaporates. This is how Steven Spielberg's vision of our near future goes, expressed in the signifiers of a neo-noir, mainly because the veil of security and protection has been - today, in 2002 and for decades to come - irrevocably torn from our eyes. What we see (and what we don't see) becomes a matter of life and death in this dark thriller, based on the Philip K. Dick story, about pre-crime cop John Anderton (Tom Cruise), whose loyalty and Dedication to your job cannot save you from small bureaucratic forces. Screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen's plot falls perfectly into place, propelled by impressive action scenes: metallic crawling spiders tick and swarm across the floor of a decrepit apartment to find Anderton, the man submerged in an icy bathtub with recently darkened eyes. for black market surgery, he immediately springs to mind, but what strikes you most is Spielberg's sophistication, unafraid of the grim news the movie prophesies of him, even as he fakes a storybook ending. .—Sinacola House

53.Videodromo(1985)

Director:david cronenberg

Videodromowears many skins: it's a near-future thriller on the lines between man and machine, a sadomasochistic fantasy, a chronicle of one man's tragic descent into madness, and even a tirade against society's abusive relationship with theatrical violence. . However, more than any dermis he claims as his own,Videodromoit's horror to the bone, a dash of ghostly mania wielded by the genre's most cerebral master. The mind is where Cronenberg trudges, taking the darker wanderings of his imagination, steeped in symbolism and subconscious debris, to visceral extremes. The same can be said for traveling salesman Max Renn (the ever-sweaty James Woods), manager of a cable TV channel dedicated to finding new and innovative entertainment, who stumbles upon a pirated broadcast signal carrying "Videodrome," a series apparently without complications. with graphic torture and death. As Cronenberg's dark dreams often do, "Videodrome" begins to distort Renn's reality (our mind's eye, as one episode explains to him, is the television screen) and the malevolent forces behind "Videodrome" convince him to go on a killing spree , armed with his newly developed mutated cyborg hand (which may be a hallucination, but probably isn't). Throughout the film, Cronenberg literalizes Renn's grossest thoughts, cutting a vaginal hole in her stomach (which he doggedly shoves his gun into) or turning her TV into a pulsing venous organ, manifesting each apocalyptic vision with reality. immediate touch. In itVideodromoPerhaps more prominently than in any of his other films, Cronenberg squeezes the trials of the sleeping mind like toothpaste from a tube in the sickening light of day, unable to push them back. the more it holds us together.—Sinacola House

52.Soylent Verde(1973)

Director:ricardo fleischer

Cannibalism is usually such an intimate topic. not so inSoylent Verde, a loose adaptation of Harry Harrison's 1966 novel,Create space! Create space!, in which “Soylent Green is people!” Along with his famous call tocleaner monkey hands and less pawing, Charlton Heston's delivery ofSoylent VerdeThe signature line proved to be one of his most enduring contributions to pop culture, as well as one of the great spoilers in movie history. —Miguel Burgin

51.tomorrow's worldmiWorld of Tomorrow - Episode Two: The Burden of Other People's Thoughts(2015; 2017)

Director:Dom Hertzfeldt

In the first 16-minute part, Don Hertzfeldt charts the fate of humanity: a vastly interconnected era of malfunctioning connections. In stick figures, vibrantly colored impressionist fragments, geometric matrices, an excerpt from a Strauss opera, and the perspective of a girl, Emily (Winona Mae),tomorrow's worldmakes all the science fiction that comes before it feel limited, not complete enough, notor enough. In 16 minutes. On any of the topics that keep us up at night, that define us through our calamities - mental degradation, memory loss, nostalgia, cloning, AI, robotics, time travel, immortality, death, the incomparable loneliness of universe- in In Hertzfeldt's deceptively simple animation, it all boils down to one essence, a "yes" or "no" question: Why justto behumans are moving further and further away from each other? Further and further from ourselves? In the event that Future Emily falls for a mining robot, Hertzfeldt doesn't want us to take it seriously, but rather the pain, any pain, of Emily inevitably leaving the robot to its long, empty eternity without her. In the case of hundreds of thousands of failed time travel missions, killing time travelers, stranding them at an unknown time, or worse, depositing them in the furthest reaches of our atmosphere for their bodies to fall back into the Earth, a beautiful nocturnal spectacle of shooting stars, Hertzfeldt hopes you'll find the whole thing quite amusing, for he knows you're using laughter to bury the urge to desperately scream into the void indifferent about how pointless your existence really is. In 16 Minutes: Everything, including a moment that will make your heart race because, in 15 minutes, you've become irrevocably attached to this girl, Emily Prime, and you can't bear the thought of letting her go. this little cartoon man, to face the universe alone.

episode 2A headier, longer (22 minutes), and generally more ambitious continuation of the story of the infinitely replicating entity's first film that begins with Emily Prime, revolves around one realization, uttered by Emily-6, a clone of the clone Emily Prime met. in the first film: "If there is a soul, it is the same in all living things." Emily-6 is more of a vessel, more of a vestigial being, than an individual human, created as a backup for Emily's memories, and therefore serves no functional purpose. Once again he travels back in time to walk with Emily Prime, this time through Emily-6's own psyche, in the hope that Emily Prime can offer some context, some meaning, to whatever she's been storing up. Right away, Hertzfeldt captures this disorienting distance between our memories and our sense of inhabiting them, a distance that only grows wider and stranger with time, to the point where we even doubt its veracity. And yet these memories are the key to our immortality. Are our memories what makes us human? What does our soul do? Revisiting a moment in Emily's life when she kills an insect and realizing that the insect is dead, with no clones to replace it, just gone forever, Emily-6 realizes the futility of the project itself. her. If there's a soul, it has a different soul than Emily Prime, different than the version of Emily she's based on. The empathy of this moment, as with so much of what Hertzfeldt accomplished in just half an hour, is heartbreaking.—Sinacola House

50pimenton(2006)

Director:satoshi-kon

In an impeccable film career,pimentonis arguably Kon's greatest achievement. Adapted from the 1993 novel by Yasutaka Tsutsui (whose other notable novel,The Girl Who Leapt in Time, would form the basis of Mamoru Hosoda's 2006 film of the same name), Kon couldn't have asked for source material that would better suit his thematic idiosyncrasies as a director.pimentonfollows the story of Atsuko Chiba, a psychiatrist working on a revolutionary psychotherapy treatment involving the DC Mini, a device that allows the user to record and navigate their own dreams in a shared simulation. During the day, Atsuko maintains a consistently cool exterior, but at night she shines as the film's main protagonist: a vivacious dream detective who consults clients on her own terms. When a pair of DC Minis are stolen and released into the world, causing a flood of destruction that manifests the collective unconscious in the waking world, it's up to Paprika and his colleagues to save the day. The summary of Kon's decade-long career as a director,pimentonis a cinematic trompe l'oeil of psychedelic colors and luscious animation. Kon's transition cuts are memorable and mind-bending, the allusions to his vast palette of cinematic influences are clever, and his appeal to the multiplicity of human experience is as thoughtful and moving as ever. Unfortunately,pimentonit would turn out to be Kon's last film, as he would tragically pass away in 2010 from pancreatic cancer. One fact remains apparent when looking at the sum total of his life's work: Satoshi Kon was, and remains, one of the greatest anime directors of his time. He will be greatly missed.—Toussaint Egan

49.the other's face(1966)

Director:Hiroshi Teshigahara

In a way, Hiroshi Teshigahara was a proto-Cronenberg, a shrewd intellectual with a taste for pulp and an ability to dissect our affinities for the dirt we put around us. The body and the psyche are always portrayed in pulsating communion in Teshigahara's films, and ifwoman in the dunesfunctioned as a disarming vision of the sacrifice of transcendence to the cravings of human need (a thematic cousin of Cronenberg's bookGoosebumps), afterthe other's faceit is about how the exterior determines the interior, about our modularity, malleability and worldliness. it is from teshigaharadead ringers.

Is inArmageddon/Deep Impactway, it came out the same year as the very similarseconds. No problem, both films dominate: they are thedead ringerseach other, echoes of echoes over the echoes that make up our identity. Maybe that's all identity has ever been: the memory of a word someone's body once said, still says, but maybe not always in the same voice, and maybe the word isn't what you thought. what was it. In the beginning was the word? "Yes it saysthe other's face, barely stifling a cry.

Teshigahara's interpretation of the Kobo Abe story takes a man's face and gives him a new one. At some point, we realize that the man is gone, but we also realize that we never really knew him to begin with. in 2014Phoenix, Christian Petzold uses a similar premise to build a melodrama. However, none of that interests Teshigahara. In his harshest form, his paintings are cold, even horrifying; in its most tender form, you chose for the existential.the other's faceboth of them.—Chad Betz

48.holder(2020)

Director:Brandon Cronenberg

The arid, lonely and modest urban landscapes of the work of Brandon Cronenbergholderreflect a family perspective. Brandon is, as you already know or have probably guessed, the son of David; he shares his father's interest in bodily grotesques, the physical transformation represented by mental transformation, and a troubling topical concern with viruses. Brandon cuts deeper than Dad, though, if not (yet) with the same incisiveness, then with a clinical precision that only intensifies the intractably flowing dreamlike strangeness.holder. This haunting horror/thriller follows Tasya (Andrea Riseborough), an assassin working for a shadow organization that carries out its attacks via a remote brain connection between the assassin and the unwitting host, in this case, Colin ( Christopher Abbott). Cronenberg traces a horrifying journey from mind to mind, traced along neural pathways but predictably expressed along physical pathways. It strays into an arterial journey, the narrow vessels that contain the things of life and death in a larger body. The film has the feel of a sci-fi extravaganza reduced to a dark and dreary miniature; its raw efficiency belies the potency of Cronenberg's musings on the subject of a foreign invader corrupting a wayward soul into a poisonous society.—arroz mullholland

47.Annihilation(2018)

Director:alex garland

Annihilationis a film that is impossible to shake. Like the characters who find themselves exploring the world of the film and inexplicably trapped by it, you'll be doubting yourself all the time, wondering if what you're seeing could be real, if maybe you're going a little crazy. . The film is an almost impossible bank filmed byex machinafilmmaker Alex Garland, an aspiring sci-fi actor who slowly reveals himself to be a jerk in every possible way, a film that wants you to invest in its universe but never gives you anythingmainlandto orient yourself. This is a movie that wants to make you feel just as confused and terrified as the characters you're watching. In this, he is unquestionably successful. This is a risky proposition for a director, especially with a big studio movie with big stars like this - this is a movie that gets more confusing and disorienting as it progresses. Garland mesmerizes with images of him, but he wants you to lose your balance, to experience this world the way Lena (Natalie Portman) and everyone else experiences it. Like the alien (I think?) in his movie, Garland isn't a malevolent presence; he is simply an observer of this world, one who follows it in all possible permutations, logical or otherwise. It is difficult to explainAnnihilation, which is a great raison d'etre. This is a movie about loss, regret, and the feeling of the world constantly falling apart and rearranging itself around you at every possible second. the world ofAnnihilationIt looks familiar, but only at first. Reality is fluid and elusive. It can feel a bit like our current reality in that way.—Will Leitch

46.primer(2004)

Director:Shane Carruth

primerit doesn't work like most movies, it's pretty much reverse engineered to require repeat viewings to at least figure out what's going on. Shane Carruth, who wrote, directed, starred in, edited and scored the film on an impossible budget of $7,000, is, more than a decade laterprimerpremiere, still a rarity in the studio system, able to create groundbreaking films completely outside of that system while relying on the intelligence of its audience to trust that it has everything under control. Difficulty untanglingprimerThe labyrinthine time-travel plot misses Carruth's approach: Constrained (or perhaps inspired) by a non-existent budget, Carruth stripped his story down to its most basic elements, providing exposure in overheard conversations, offering virtually nothing in the form of a map-to-map narrative: Follow along, competing in place to explore in the most mundane way possible how two software engineers would wield the unthinkable power of time travel. While it may frustrate many uninterested in translating this kind of metaphysical visual language, Carruth's film aims for more far-reaching prizes: navigatingprimerit feels, we can only imagine, how Carruth's characters would feel on the precipice of the completely unexplored unknown. That, despite all his distancing tactics and opaque conundrums,primeryet operating on a deeply human level, it is Carruth's true success.Upstreamcould be a sign that Carruth is only going to get better, butprimerremains a modern staple of sci-fi cinema: a story about the mysteries of reality revealed only to the most common, living the most common lives, among us.—Sinacola House

45.Arrival(2016)

Director:denis villeneuve

Your appreciation of Denis VilleneuveArrivalIt will depend on how well you like to be dodged. It's the full embodiment of Villeneuve's cinematic approach and a wonderfully absorbing piece of science fiction, a two-hour stunt best experienced with as little prior knowledge of its plot as possible. Crucially, it deals with the day the aliens land on Earth and every day after, which, to sum up the collective human response in one word, is chaos. you can get involved withArrivalfor her writing, which is powerful, moving, emotional, and most of all, compassionate. She can also interact with him through her subtext if she really looks for him. This is solid but delicate work, captured in startling, calculated detail by cinematographer Bradford Young and guided by the stellar work of Amy Adams as Louise Banks, a brilliant linguist hired by the US Army to discover how communicate with our visitors. aliens . Adams is an immensely talented chameleon actress, andArrivalallows him to use each of his various camouflages over the course of its duration. She sweats, cries, bleeds, fights and much more that cannot be said here without revealing the film's most impressive treasures. She also represents humanity with more dignity and grace than any other modern actor. If aliens land on Earth, maybe we should send them over to say hello. —Andy Crump

44.Blade Runner 2049(2017)

Director:denis villeneuve

The debate over what makes something "real" and what doesn't has become a staple of adult sci-fi in the more than three decades since Ridley Scott made one genre masterpiece after another, circling the same debate. , but the strength ofBlade Runner 2049it lies in how intimately Villeneuve (and writers Hampton Fancher and Michael Green) try to make us experience this world through the unreal eyes of a replicant, K (Ryan Gosling). Ideally, we are forced to think about what "humanity" is when empathy (caring for these robots) is the natural outgrowth of the filmmakers' storytelling.

reviewingRewarded accommodation, you can see that there is not much history there. The same can be said of Dick's novel, as well as many of his novels: there is impressive world-building, impressive use of language, and speculative ideas expanded and intended for fully conceived purposes, but our characters are just people who exist. in this world. , YRewarded accommodationit's actually just the story of a cop chasing four dangerous criminals.2049, despite its heavy themes and heavier exposition, is about a police officer who must find a very special robot before the evil megacorporation does. the glow ofRewarded accommodation, and now its sequel, is that the majesty of the imagination behind them, the sheer magnanimity of the science fiction on display, is enough to bring us together with these characters. To take care of them.

Blade Runner 2049, making it arguably the most beautiful thing to come out of a major studio in a long time. Roger Deakins instilled Jordan Cronenweth's vivid sense of a future on the brink of obsolescence, drawing on the overwhelming restlessness that permeates Ridley Scott's monolithic Los Angeles. The scale of the film is matched only by the constant fear of the dark: lighting changes endlessly, dust and pollution mount, choking the sense-destroying corporate buildings and hyper-stylized rooms in which humanity withdraws from the world. dying natural who have lived. created. . There's a huge world, a solar system, orbiting this seedy city, so overblown that San Diego is now a giant dump for New LA's trash, but much of it is in shadow and opacity, forever just out of reach. What Scott and Cronenweth accomplished with the original film, placing a cauldron within a superbly conceived alternate reality, Villeneuve and Deakins respected as they pushed their limits. There is no other way to describe what they did than praise: Theygetthis.—Sinacola House

43.star troops(1997)

Director:Pablo Verhoeven

Brilliant rude bacchanalia and agitprop after school special, Paul Verhoevenstar troopshe revels in the ultraviolence he delivers in strong spurts, but then punishes himself for having so much fun with something so bad. It tells the story of a group of extremely attractive upper-middle-class white teenagers (played by brilliant adults Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Nina Meyers, Jake Busey and Neil Patrick Harris) who have their cherries popped and then ground to make a hamburger. Inside the slaughterhouse of interstellar warfare, Verhoeven crosses over the many shades of bellicose cinema: aggressive propaganda, gritty action set-pieces, and thrilling adventure sequences, all accompanied by plenty of stomach-churning CGI, giant space bugs, and exploding human heads. without shame or recourse or respect for basic physics and human empathy. Both a bloodletting of Verhoeven's childhood trauma, forged in the fascist mill of World War II Europe, and a critique of Hollywood's chivalrous attitude toward violence and uniformly heroic portrayals of the military, the science show fiction cannot avoid reaching the goal. Same spot no matter what angle you look at it from: nerd in extreme cinematic mayhem.—Sinacola House

42.Planet of the Apes(1968)

Director:Franklin J Schaffner

"What will you find there, doc?"

"Your destiny"

That's what conservative ape scientist Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans) tells compassionate ape "veterinarian" Dr. Zira (Kim Hunter) at the end of the original.Planet of the Apes, as misanthropic astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston) heads into the Forbidden Zone of this upside-down planet, where intelligent, talking apes are the dominant species and humans are dumb beasts, to find out what really happened to his species. Unless you've lived under a rock for the past 50 years, you know exactly what you'll find.

But why is Zaius calling this literally devastating revelation Taylor's fate instead of her past, which is technically the case? The answer to this lies in the role of Zaius in ape society. Unlike all the other apes, Zaius knows the history of the painful and complex relationship between apes and humans. He knows how humans' natural attraction to war, persecution, prejudice and cruelty sealed his ultimate fate and (perhaps in vain) is trying to prevent this "intellectual virus" from spreading to the beloved apes of he. He knows that once an intelligent human like Taylor has a chance to start anew another attempt at civilization for his species, the same ugliness and destruction that comes with his inner nature will surely plague his descendants. So he knows that Taylor will find her past and his future on that beach.

Today thePlanet of the ApesThe franchise is still going strong. The timeless appeal of these films stems from the fact that they explore high-concept themes like the inherent cruelty and fragility of human nature with brutal clarity, told with a refreshing lack of condescension and philosophical grounding. Presenting a legendary world where what we now think of as animals dominate humanity, they reflect our ugliness, arrogance, and perhaps our chance at redemption.

Each installment and iteration of the franchise contains a handful of characters who struggle to go against their most base impulses and strive to bring compassion and peace to their kind. Yes, these movies never forget to cultivate the value of hope for a world at peace, but they are never naive enough to try to sell audiences on the idea that it's an easy task, as evidenced by the woefully bleak endings that follow. found in most of them. .

The one who started it all remains the epitome ofPlanet of the Apesexperience Co-written byTwilight Zoneco-creator Rod Serling, the sci-fi fable structure of the novel's adaptation fits Serling's sensibilities as flawlessly as the original.Planet of the Apesmay be the closest we'll get to a one-story feature filmTwilight Zonefilm, creating a sort of balanced synergy between the raw emotion of the genre and the balanced morality tale.—Oktay Ege Kozak

41.ex machina(2015)

Director:alex garland

While popular science fiction movies have taught us that no matter what we do, robots that become self-aware will eventually rise up and kill us, recent advances in artificial intelligence in the real world have confirmed something much darker. on the human imperative: yes If we have the technology to design robots that think and feel, we will always try to have sex with them. Always. Alex Garland's beautiful creepy movie seems to want to fill that void. Taking cues from obvious predecessors like2001: A Space OdysseymiI A- some will even compare it toThey are—ex machinastands out solidly as a highly stylized and engrossing film, never overly reliant on CGI and instead relying on the broad talents of a small cast.

The movie title is a play on words.deus ex machina("machine god"), which is a plot device in which an unexpected event or character appears seemingly out of nowhere to solve a storytelling problem. Garland takes the phrase literally: Here, that machine is a robot named Ava, played by Swedish actress Alicia Vikander, and nowhere is where his creator, Nathan (Oscar Isaac), conducts his research and experiments. Ava is a heavenly mechanical body of vigorous circuitry topped off with a lovely face reminiscent of a Chris Cunningham creation. Its creator is an alcoholic genius and head of a Google-like search engine called Bluebook, which made him incredibly rich. Enter Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who arrives by helicopter after winning the lottery at work that rewards him with a week at Nathan's house. Nathan also intends to use Caleb to perform a Turing test of sorts on steroids on Ava to determine if she can truly exhibit human behavior.

Truly,ex machinait seems designed around the performances of his excellent mini-ensemble. Vikander especially strikes the perfect balance between prosthetic personality and genuine empathy, enhanced by the film's own oscillation between some wonderfully titillating and terrifying moments: Caleb watches Ava undress in front of a monitor, revealing her metal and circuitry. she; Nathan and his other sex robot perform an amazingly synchronized disco dance; and Caleb losing his mind and questioning his own humanity with the help of a razor blade. It's also an extremely compelling, appropriately seductive film, no doubt designed to spark conversations about the inherent morality of "creating" intelligence, as well as whether or not it's cool to have sex with robots.—Jonas Flicker

40world on a thread(1973)

Director:Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Those who still beat the drum forMatrixRainer Werner Fassbinder's apparent "innovation" should reserve a four-hour slot for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's ornate sci-fi drama.world on a thread, and discovering that the idea of ​​our world as a simulation (within a simulation, within a simulation...) had already been addressed 26 years earlier. Recently revived as a "lost classic" by Fassbinder, it's hard to imagine how visionaryworld on a threadwas to have appeared at the time, originally shown on German television in 1973. The technical director of a company that created a simulation of an entire world within its computers, Dr. Fred Stiller (Klaus Lowitch) personally investigates after his colleagues they begin to disappear, and those around him insist that the disappeared never existed. Beautifully framed among the mirrors and tacky futuristic decor of early 1970s Germany, the film is styled like the paranoid thrillers that were so popular at the time, only here mistrust grows like an epidemic: initially embodying Stiller's associates, then the government, to finally include Stiller. fellow citizens and the very world in which he lives. Fashion has aged; ideas not.—Brogan Morris

39.predator(1987)

Director:John McTiernan

Despite all the jokes and terrible imitations made over the decades at the expense of Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger, during his heyday in the 1980s, the actor had a certainHappiness of livingunmatched by any action performer in Hollywood (with the possible exception of Bruce Willis). Schwarzenegger's mischievous charm contrasts beautifully with his burly, muscular physique, a dynamic he's always happy to entertain. Butpredatoris one of the movies from its heyday that dared to evoke a threat that even the specter of Schwarzenegger might not be able to conquer, a space-traveling alien trophy hunter amassing a grisly collection of skulls and thorns everywhere. . It's a basic premise that's been utterly torn apart by B-movie imitators in the years since, but none of them come close to replicating the hyper-macho camaraderie he does.predatoran enduringly funny relic of its time. The sophomore banter between the likes of Jesse Ventura, Carl Weathers, and Shane Black is what sets the film apart, infusing it with a somehow endearing gentlemen's club mentality, fully aware of its inherent stupidity. We want to see this merry band of special forces agents conquer the faceless chameleon that stands against them. Here's a wry satire on America's attitude toward meddling in the affairs of less-developed nation states, but more than anything,predatorit's simply one of the best cat and mouse games of the 80's.—Jim Vorel

38.seconds(1966)

Director:Juan frankenheimer

Of all the movies on this list, one of the ones that has the world closest to ours can be found in the John Frankenheimer movie.seconds. Setting the coast-to-coast story in prosperous 1960s America, Frankenheimer peers through a thin veil of science fiction at what he sees as a reclusive way of life. Approached by a mysterious group known as "the Company," middle-aged family man Arthur Hamilton (John Randolph) is given the chance to fake his death and start anew as bohemian California painter Tony Wilson (Rock Hudson). . Touching the existential core, however, "Tony" only finds his new life as empty as his last, a construct populated by Company actors and other "born again" who only want to sustain the illusion. James Wong Howe's shadow-laden cinematography and Jerry Goldsmith's anxious horror score apply the paranoid gloss to what is really a grim examination of the contemporary domestic worker: grim because, without the presence of the elusive and amoral Company,secondsThe dystopian Earth is truly ours.—Brogan Morris

37.The fifth element(1997)

Director:lucas besson

In one of Luc Besson's early scenes,The fifth element, there is a subtle but very revealing exchange between the two leads of the film. Taxi driver Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) sees his daily routine interrupted when Leeloo (one of Milla Jovovich's early leads) arrives on the roof. She speaks an ancient language, so the two can't communicate, until she says the word "boom." "I understand 'boom,'" Korben replies. Immediately, we are pushed to the limits of Korben's worldview, mainly restricted to macho action. This is also the first hint we've got that this is a self-reflective role for Willis, taking a look at his badass star persona and delving into what exactly makes him such a believable "guy movie" centerpiece. For all his typical manly heroism, Korben is a misfit in the film's wacky space-opera future. He's an alpha male, tailor-made for the '80s or '90s, but after finishing his time in the military, he's adrift. The 23rd century has no place for him: he lives alone after a failed marriage, has trouble keeping his job (and his driver's license), can't quit smoking, and has no friends outside of his old squad. When the mysterious Leeloo literally appears in Korben's life, he automatically assumes the role of protector. It turns out that Leeloo is a supreme being, sent to Earth to protect humanity from an ancient force that threatens the planet every 5,000 years. There is a contradiction at the heart ofThe fifth element, with Korben's manly heroism at odds with his social awkwardness. The film does not attempt to reconcile them, but allows Korben to find his own way. He learns to work with others and accept the more sensitive side of him, even when he's cunning and cool. In the end, it's Leeloo who has the power to save Earth from an apocalyptic alien attack. She is the supreme being sent to Earth for this purpose. But she still needs Korben, and at the last moment he discovers her role. It's hard to tell just how intentional this was all, as Besson still gives us a stoic tough guy who saves the day. But with Besson he doesn't replace the male action hero, he makes him more complex.—Federico Blichert

36.Invasion of the body snatchers(1978)

Director:Felipe Kaufman

No real need for the limited credit film intro, a nature documentary-like sequence in which the alien spores that will soon take over all of Earth float through the cosmos and descend on our stupid third iceberg from the Sun. , because from the moment we meet health inspector Matthew Bennell (Donald Sutherland) and his colleague with whom he is madly in love, Elizabeth Driscoll (Brooke Adams), the world they wander through seems suspiciouslyoff. Although Philip Kaufman's remake of the 1956 Don Siegel filmInvasion of the body snatchersIt begins as something of a rom-com, dripping witty lines between alluring San Francisco city dwellers as Danny Zeitlin's score soars eerily higher and higher, Kaufman weaving each frame mischievously. Strangely acting extras fill the backgrounds of the tracking shots, and garbage trucks full of fluffs of weird dust (which we eventually found out spread spores) exist at the edges of the screen. The audience, of course, assembles the pieces long before the characters - characters including Jeff Goldblum on his bean pole and Leonard Nimoy in his less-Spock version - but that's the point: as our leads slowly discover that the world that they no longer know anything they understand, so this latent anxiety fills and then usurps the film. Kaufman accumulates more and more sickening and bewildering images until he delivers a final scene so bleak that he might as well be punctuating his film and his view of modern life with a final and inevitable fall into the mouth of hell.—Sinacola House

35.forbidden planet(1956)

Director:Fred M Wilcox

forbidden planetit's a rarity in a decade of low-budget sci-fi. Made by MGM Studios and functioning as a narrative retread of Shakespeare's work.Storm— this is high-quality, intelligent sci-fi with state-of-the-art special effects. A spaceship of American astronauts lands on an alien planet where the inhabitants try to safeguard the ruins of a previous civilization. Famous for its iconic "Robby the Robot," more complex and intelligent than most of its screen-automated predecessors,forbidden planetit is head and shoulders above most of the science fiction of the 1950s.—Andy Crump

34.recover full(1990)

Director:Pablo Verhoeven

Based very loosely on the Philip K. Dick short story "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (and aren't all PKD adaptations "too loose"?),recover fullit works as a construct for Paul Verhoeven to take a high-concept premise about memory implants and identity loss and motivational uncertainty and turn it into an Arnold Schwarzenegger idiot party. It should be bad, but it's not; It's supposed to be cheesy and funny at best, but it's even more than that. Unlike many of its sci-fi action counterparts,recover fullnever runs out of energy or ideas; It starts with the memory implant, but ultimately gives us a vividly imagined Mars society with an oppressed mutant population (which is, like, the best special effects makeup portfolio ever) and a secret alien reactor that's a MacGuffin, but also adeus ex machina. The plot is a mess, but so is Arnold. Everything works.

recover fullThe production budget of $60 million was absolutely huge for its time, but unlike similar Hollywood ventures that poured money into glitter (like the 2012 remake, So Slick It Slips Off Your Head), Verhoeven uses the loot to give us more dust, more guts, more decrepit sets, more twisted prosthetics, and the ultimate Arnold. Verhoeven, in fact, uses Arnold as much as anything else in the budget to tell this darkly exuberant story, from the twisted mess of the setting to the shocking finale. This results in a science fiction speech written in the form of a hundredAhh-nuldfaces, absurd and unforgettable. Of all the times Dick has been adapted, this is perhaps the only time the energy and imagination of his work has found its way to the big screen (Rewarded accommodationis something totally different).recover fullit may have little in common with the actual content of the story it reveals, but it knows the vibe. And the PKD vibes are the best.—Chad Betz

33.fantastic planet(1973)

Director:Rene Laloux

It does not matter if you are watching the excellent and eccentric film by René Laloux.fantastic planetFor the first time or fortieth time, under the influence or stone sober: The film is such a unique rarity in cinema that each viewing feels like a completely unique experience. Simply put, there is nothing like it. If you haven't seen this masterpiece of 1970s psychedelia and social commentary, you're missing out. If youhaveseen, chances are you haven't seen anything like it since, because there's not much in animated cinema to match. The closest thing you'll get is Terry Gilliam's paper strip animation styles inMonty Python's Flying Circus, or perhaps Eiji Yamamoto's static painting approachbelladonna of sadness. None of these are the samefantastic planetHowever, the visual scheme only underlines your individuality. where a movie likefantastic planetcomes from? How do you do this? Laloux has offered few answers over the years, although the documentarySalsa Lalouxhas an idea of ​​how your mind works. Maybe it's not worth looking for the answers in the first place, and maybe the best way to understandfantastic planetjust watch, and then watch again. —Andy Crump

32.Mechanical orange(1971)

Director:Stanley Kubrick

As with most (well, probablyall) of Stanley Kubric's screen adaptations of the book,Mechanical orangeit remixes various aspects of Anthony Burgess's novel, and probably for the better (at least Alex [a terrifyingly electric Malcolm McDowell] isn't a pedophile in Kubrick's film, for example). It remains a relentlessly cruel satire depicting a society that is permissive of brutal youth culture, where modern science and psychology are the best countermeasures to combat Ultraviolence™ committed by men like Alex and his fellow droogs. It's painfully clear that when the British Home Secretary (Anthony Sharp) singles out Alex as a victim, spoiler alert! - evil wins. Christ, can any of us hear"Singing under the rain"the same after this nightmare?—Scott Wold

31The thing(1982)

Director:john carpenter

No disrespect to the classic Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks version ofthe thing from another world1951, but John Carpenter's 1982 reimagining of that story inThe thingit is one of the greatest acts of modernization in cinema. In a way that was imitated six years later by Chuck Russell's remake ofby drop, Carpenter took a thinly veiled Cold War allegory and wrapped it up in his taut, atmospheric style, heightening the suspense and ominous payoff provided by FX's groundbreaking work, while expanding the titular monster's mythology and capabilities. Each frame is a visual puzzle: Carpenter's camera pans to empty corridors, open doors and cloaked figures in the arctic air. Who is the Thing, and more controversially,Whenmias theDid they become the Thing? To this day, theories pile up endlessly in the dark corners of the internet, as Carpenter's visual clues and Bill Lancaster's script seem to provide audiences with most, but never all, of the information they need to be insurance. Rob Bottin delivers what may be the literal zenith of practical effects in horror movie history duringThe thingThere are several transformation scenes, and particularly in the mind-boggling sequence with Norris's (Charles Hallahan) severed head sprouting legs to become a crab-like creature, which he then tries to run away. The film is an artifact of the purity of '80s big-budget horror: a next-level special effects thing, mind-expanding mystery, masterful direction, and the genius that is Kurt Russell as the icing on the cake.—Jim Vorel

30I love you I love you(1968)

Director:Alain Resnais

Claude (Claude Rich) is unable to successfully commit suicide, so he commits himself to the abyss of time. As in the case of Chris Markeroh pierand, later, in the work of Michel GondryEternal glow of the mind without memories(which Gondry admitted was inspired in part by the Resnais film), the passage of time is experienced as the sum total of a person's memories, distributed as estimated data points along the illusory y-axis of our lives, and therefore, subject to the whims and tenuous subjectivity of our neuroses, our chemistry and, above all, our nostalgia. Depressed and in a kind of existential shock after the death of his wife, Claude subjects himself to a highly experimental time travel device invented by a shadowy group of private investigators. Like Marker's time machine, Resnais' technology seems to take place mostly in the protagonist's head, creating his vessel more like a ger in the desert, ready for a vision quest (stocked with beanbags and "medicines"). " managed, presented perhaps only semantically). of something like Ayahuasca) than a transport capsule, although Claude's body physically separates over time. Intending to go back just a few minutes to experience small fragments of space-time, Claude does not experience, as he usually does, the room that scientists intended him to experience, recycled and regurgitated by ever-random moments in his life that, taken together, describe the truth and tragedy behind the truth and tragedy that Claude has convinced himself is real. A master class in film editing,I love you I love youhe wallows in the transience of love, all the more painful and all the more opportune, for that reason.—Sinacola House

29Star Trek II: The Khan's Wrath(1982)

Director:Nicholas Meyer

Come to the “KhaaAAHHHHHHN!” and stick around for the surprisingly moving treatise on growing old without wisdom, as well as a powerful and sobering finale. Anyone who defends any other film in thewalkingThe franchise will find itself speaking through a black hole chewed through the matte screen by the exquisitely potent villain, played by Ricardo Montalbán. That director/co-writer too, Nicholas Meyer, somehow convinces a performance by William Shatner that he's just not kosher and makes this film a space opera with wide and lasting appeal.—Scott Wold

28They live(1988)

Director:john carpenter

Like most of John Carpenter's movies,They livethey can be read however you want; after all, they are mainly to please you. A sharp commentary on consumerism gleefully carved with a blunt knife, or perhaps something closer to a concerned embrace of the bourgeois joys inherent in silly violence, or perhaps just a weird sci-fi action movie with an odd leading man:They liveit is, almost inherently, a joy to watch. It's as if Carpenter has spun some sort of primordially aligned axis of pleasure along his spine, sending shivers as he balances insight and idiocy over the course of his story about a homeless man ("Rowdy" Roddy Piper) who, With the help of her magical sun glasses, she discovers that the rich and powerful are just as grotesque as she ever imagined. Each of Carpenter's bizarre plot choices click together as if predetermined, so that when Piper is in a completely pointless six-minute fight scene with Keith David, one can't help but love that Carpenter is on point. final. us, the thing is that it is not a joke. The fight scene exists on its own, as perhaps too much ofThey liveit does. Carpenter is a fucking genius.—Sinacola House

27The flight(1958; 1986)

Directors:Kurt Neumann (1958) y David Cronenberg (1986)

In betweenby drop,The thingmiThe flight, the '80s were a magical decade for remaking the already iconic horror/sci-fi movies of the '50s. The original Kurt Neumann/Vincent Price version ofThe flightIt's sometimes dismissed as nothing more than a "camp classic," but it's a substantial film that's generally more mysterious than horror: a highly focused narrative revolving around the question of why a woman confessed to crushing her husband to death in a hydraulic press. Vincent Price is as entertaining and frustrating a scientist as you would no doubt hope him to be. Cronenberg's version, like the remake ofby drop, takes that basic premise and dresses it up in both black humor and body horror, Jeff Goldblum's investigator literally watches pieces of his body gelatinize and melt in front of him. As "Brundle", he is full of maniacal energy, wit, and eventually, an insectoid-enhanced physicality. WithThe thing, the film is one of the last big hits of the practical effects horror era, featuring some of the most disgusting gore and makeup effects of all time. Once you've seen a man-sized fly spewing acid, it's hard to look at a common housefly the same way again.—Jim Vorel

26ET the alien(1982)

Director:steven spielberg

Steven Spielberg's classic is many things: an ode to friendship that resonates with children and adults alike, one of the highest-grossing films of all time, and the moment his career, on a scale of 1 to 10, earned an 11. The Academy wouldn't award Spielberg the Best Director trophy until more Nazis were involved,ETit remains perhaps the most deft expression of his directorial hand, weaving all the usual "alien visitation" tropes with the most shared human experience, childhood, until the science fiction seems less important than the humanity portrayed.—Michael Burgin

25akira(1988)

Director:Katsuhiro Otomo

The sum total of anime cinema from the early 1990s to the present is marked by the precedent of Katsuhiro Otomo.akira. Adapted from the first chapters of Otomo's historic manga series, Akira was the most expensive animated film of its time and a cinematographic benchmark that shocked the entire industry. Taking place 31 years after World War III was triggered by a massive explosion that engulfed the city of Tokyo, Akira is set in the sprawling metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, built on the ruins of the ancient and teetering precariously on the edge. of social unrest. . The film follows the stories of Kaneda Shotaro and Tetsuo Shima, two members of a motorcycle gang whose lives are irrevocably changed one fateful night on the outskirts of the city. While fighting a rival biker gang during a turf fight, Tetsuo bumps into a strange boy and is whisked away by an underground military team as Kaneda and his friends look on helplessly. From then on, Tetsuo begins to develop terrifying new psychic abilities while Kaneda desperately tries to mount a rescue. Eventually, the journeys of these two childhood friends will collide and collide in a spectacular series of showdowns involving a sinister secret whose origins lie at the dark heart of the city's cataclysmic past: a power known only as "Akira."

Cutghost in the shellwho followed him,akirait is considered a touchstone of the cyberpunk genre, although its inspirations run much deeper than a homage to William Gibson.neuromanteo Ridley ScottRewarded accommodation.akirais a film whose origins and aesthetics are inextricably rooted in the history of post-war Japan, from the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and the "Anpo" student protests of that era to the country's economic boom and the then-burgeoning counterculture of Bosozoku races.akirais a film with many messages, one of which is a coded anti-nuclear parable and diatribe against arbitrary capitalism and the arrogance of "progress." But perhaps most moving, deep down, is the story of watching your best friend turn into a monster.akiraalmost solely responsible for the anime boom of the early 1990s in the West, his aesthetic vision spilled over into every major art form, inspiring an entire generation of artists, filmmakers, and even musicians in its wake. For these reasons and more, every anime fan must deal at some point or another withakiraas the greatest anime film ever made.—Toussaint Egan

24Eternal glow of the mind without memories(2004)

Director:miguel gondry

In what may be Charlie Kaufman's best script, a boy meets a girl, not realizing that they may be living in an eternal, doomed recurrence. A brain cleaning company allows its clients to erase selected people or events from their memory. It turns out that Joel (a repressed Jim Carrey) and Clementine (a vibrant Kate Winslet) have done this before. Technology is the great enabler and perhaps a secret destroyer, except that the sci-fi aspect ofEternal glow of the mind without memoriesit's just a helper for the relational dynamic kernel. Devoid of fantasy, the film's subject matter is not a Luddite cautionary tale, but simply a wistful observation of human relationships. It was always like this. We have quite a talent for failing each other... and ourselves.

There is nothing as damning as this statement ineternal sunbeam, a film that watches and mourns the breakup of a capricious circus. Plunging us into Joel's mind, Gondry's in-camera effects and near-experimental editing guide us through the increasingly tragic process of eliminating Clementine. When I first saw this movie in theaters in 2004, I swore I would never do what Joel does to try to heal himself, but I've lived a bit since then and now I'm not sure I can say the same. I deleted phone numbers and photos on Facebook, I had about a month in which I carefully unchecked; Sometimes I'm scared to even look at my feed. No matter what the social setting, humans will use whatever is available to dull pain, especially emotional pain. But sometimes we need what we want to get rid of; there is no upgrade without vulnerability, risk and, inevitably, heartbreak. The final shot ofeternal sunbeamIt lingers in my memory, forever on loop: Joel and Clementine, stumbling on a joke off-camera, on a snowy beach in Montauk. It looks like an extrapolation of the final shot ofthe 400 hits: "Stuck in Ecstasy" became "Stuck in Replay". And yet, in this scene there is acceptance, possibly even hope. There are no immaculate minds, but maybe some can still shine.—Chad Betz

23Close Encounters of the Third Kind(1977)

Director:steven spielberg

intimate encounterit was the personal project Spielberg wanted to pursue once he had established himself as a Hollywood power player. The enormous success ofjawsit gave him the chance to make his big-budget, special effects, character-driven sci-fi story of humanity's place in the galaxy, a rare optimistic and benign chronicle of first contact. The story of a father (Spielberg's alter ego Richard Dreyfuss) abandoning his family out of obsession allowed Spielberg to deal with inner demons related to his career, his own family and his upbringing, while looking outside. , exploring the cosmos without limits. immense admiration. .—Oktay Ege Kozak

22They are(2013)

Director:pincho jonze

Spike Jonze's colossal talent was too great to remain trapped in MTV's orbit; this was immediately clear when he made his film debut,Ser John Malkovich, earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Director. After this little postmodern masterpiece, he and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman continued their journey into solipsism with the hilariously unhingedAdaptation. As challenging, fun, and accessible as Kaufman's scripts are, Jonze's scriptsThey areanswers any lingering questions about whether the (well-deserved) acclaim for these two films arose from the power of Kaufman's words alone. Keeping the sweeter parts of the empathically quirky characters, the psychosexuality and twisted pathos ofMalkovich,They areIt successfully pulls off a tremendously difficult feat in film: a wonderfully mature and penetrating novel dressed in sci-fi garb. Stunning sets and cinematography, as well as clever dialogue delivered by a subtly powerful Joaquin Phoenix, make Jonze's latest film one of the best films of 2013. It also serves as confirmation that, in addition toThey are-directorit isthe whole package. —scott wold

21terminator(1984)

Director:James Cameron

First of James Cameronterminator of the future(and second feature) is less of a popcorn action movie than its upgraded sequel, but that makes it even scarier of a movie: dark, dark, filled with a silent villain calmly ripping chunks out of his damaged face to hit more accurately. their victims The task ahead of Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) seems so insurmountable: even with a soldier from the future, going after the T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger, duh) with modern weapons is so ineffective that it's almost comical. . . It is as if Schwarzenegger is interpreting entropy itself - entropy is apparently a matter ofterminatorseries, given the time-hopped makeovers, reboots, and retreads since then. You can destroy a terminator, but the future (seemingly driven by box office receipts) refuses to change. —he told them

20the iron Giant(1999)

Director:brad bird

Brad Bird's debut championed traditional hand-drawn art at a time when computer animation was gaining popularity, released by studios who didn't realize how special a film they were holding in their hands, putting little or nothing into it. marketing behind. . Happily,the iron Giantreceived due recognition on home video. Set in the 1950s and based on the nuclear fears of the time, as well as Bird's personal tragedy regarding gun violence.the iron Giantembodies the hallmark of sci-fi at the time, a giant metal robot, in a moving coming-of-age story. Bird moves effortlessly between riotous comedy (like young Hogarth's efforts to hide his huge robot friend from his mother), intense action, and poignant moments of fear and friendship.—Jeremy Mathews

19Jurassic Park(1993)

Director:steven spielberg

Jurassic Park, in 1993, was an achievement in the big cinematic leagues. WhatStar Warsbefore that, it featured a quantum leap in visual effects, both physical and CGI, in this case. Most important, however, were the advances in CGI.Jurassic Park, for better or worse, probably represents the first moment in our modern AAA Hollywood mythos where an audience can look at CGI-driven creatures, nod in agreement, and just accept them as part of the story. Married to one of the best pure adventure stories in Spielberg's celebrated canon,Jurassic ParkIt was the spectacle we expect from the traditional “blockbuster”. That vague term, since the days ofjaws, has always referred to a kind of movies that are supposed to succeed by captivating us and leaving us speechless.Jurassic Parkhe did it in a way that infinitely raised the bar for all spin-off-driven money makers, for everything, after that.—Jim Vorel

18Metropolis(1927)

Director:fritz lang

Metropolisit never slows down as it delivers a constant stream of iconic images. Fritz Lang stuffed his parable with every sci-fi/adventure trope he could: the mad scientist, the robot, the rooftop chase, the catacombs, and, as a result, a devious henchman.Metropolis, it's also a great reminder of how hard it is to judge an incomplete movie. In fact, material is missing from many silent films, even when it is not clear from screenings or home videos. While Lang's film has always been known for its spectacular special effects (I'm legally required to use the phrase "visionary" when talking about it), until a few years ago modern audiences didn't see a film close to what it opened. it turns out thatMetropolisFritz Rasp's better performance as a ruthless spy for the corporate state was some of that missing material and gives the film a greater sense of urgency, heightening the sense of class antagonism. With that unknown excellence that lurks in one of the most famous movies of all time, it leaves us wondering what else was lost in the nitrate flames. —jeremy mateo

17Solaris(1972)

Director:Andrei Tarkovsky

In 2002, Steven Soderbergh adapted Stanislaw Lem's classic sci-fi novel into a perfectly fine and beautiful film. It's the only time a Tarkovsky film's story has been duplicated, sharing source material, and it illustrates an important truth: Andrei Tarkovsky's vision is singular, inimitable; he rises above all others. Where a talented director like Soderbergh made a serviceable sci-fi film, Tarkovsky made visual poetry of the highest order.

Tarkovsky's artistic instincts rarely failed him, and although it was a big-budget genre film,Solarishe takes risks with the same confidence of expression and the same depth of resonance as any of Tarkovsky's films. The science fiction concept of the titular planetary entity allows Tarkovsky a new angle on the same themes pondered in many of his works: the central roles of history and memory in our present and future; the heavy responsibility of the individual to respond to the calls of the sublime; the struggle to know the truth. Tarkovsky's long-term free associative aesthetic was based on his philosophy of filmmaking as "sculpting in time" and, inSolaristhere's a fascinating confluence between the way Tarkovsky manipulates time and perception and the way Solyaris manipulates these things. Solyaris returns the protagonist, astronaut psychologist Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), to his late wife Hari (Natalya Bondarchuk), for what purpose is unclear. But Tarkovsky's films work in a similar way; It's hard to say exactly why they do what they do, but they pull at the deepest roots of ourselves. They evoke emotional and meditative realities like no other. Like Kelvin's resurrected Hari, the stimuli are simulacrum, symbols drawn from a collective dream, but that doesn't detract from the value of experiencing them. Sometimes they take you to a place like Solyaris takes Kelvin: an island of lost memory - or perhaps of an impossible future, flooded by the waters of some Spirit. It makes the unreal real; that brings the dream to life.—Chad Betz

sixteen.Terminator 2: Judgment Day(1991)

Director:James Cameron

This rare sequel that surpasses its predecessor, James Cameron and co-writer William Wisher Jr. crafted a near-perfect action movie script that turned the original on its head and allowed Ahnold to be a good guy. But it's Linda Hamilton's transformation from damsel in distress to evil heroine that makes the film so remarkable. Why should guys have all the good stunts?—Josh Jackson

15.WALL-E(2008)

Director:andres stanton

Opening with a sublime 45 minutes of almost no dialogue,WALL-Eit was a significant gamble for Pixar, whose remarkable string of hits up to that point fell within a fairly narrow range.WALL-Erests firmly in the realm of childhood fantasy, but writer-director Andrew Stanton moved celebrity voices away from the center of the film and was clearly aiming for something new. In a post-post-apocalyptic world where humans have gone into space and left behind an army of machines to clean up the place, 700 years have passed without much progress, and even the machines have deteriorated, except for one, one. dilapidated Ottoman-sized scrap compactor named WALL-E, who continues to live up to his directive and yearn for a lost world. When WALL-E meets a glowing white probe named Eve, their tentative relationship, like the rest of the movie, evolves with few words. Even as the setting shifts to the ship containing the aforementioned humans and the pacing shifts to action sequences with nebulous objectives, the film's promise boils down to a well-executed yet commonplace need for adrenaline.WALL-Eis a noble experiment, one that lingers in the mind long after films likecarsmissing—Roberto Davis

14back to the future(1985),Back to the Future Part II(1989) miBack to the Future Part III(1990)

Director:Roberto Zemeckis

The epic three-part journey of Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) and his legitimately insane mentor Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) not only provides the crucible through which virtually every comic adventure since has to pass, but also proves that even a small child's actions make a universe of difference. There's little to add to a popular discussion of these films other than to point out their diminishing returns with each successive entry, but that hardly dims the shine on Zemeckis' storytelling. Not a plot point is wasted, not a scene infused with nothing less than humor and emotional breadth. If that sounds a bit silly, or a bit over the top with praise, then stop to consider how these movies are viewed in the course of American cinema. While they mess with history, they also make history, and from that point of view, it's hard to imagine anyone feeling the need to go back and make this trilogy better.—Michael Burgin

13The day the earth stood still(1951)

Director:wise roberto

Robert Wise directed musicals (the sound of the music), horror movies (The hunt) and biographies (someone up there loves me). But your best movie may have beenThe day the earth stood still, his 1951 anti-war parable (based on the Harry Bates short story "Farewell to the Teacher") about the arrival of a UFO in Washington, D.C. This is no ordinary alien invasion movie: the emerging human-like alien named Klaatu (Michael Rennie) has a warning message that he wants to deliver to every leader on the planet. Instead, the military tries to stop Klaatu, who escapes and goes undercover, befriending a mother he doesn't like (Patricia Neal) and her impressionable son (Billy Gray). if all you knowThe day the earth stood stillIt is “Klaatu barada nikto”, you will be amazed by the smart, funny and clever movie – Wise produced one of the hottest sci-fi classics in Hollywood. And it's about 1000 times better than the 2008 Keanu Reeves remake.—Tim Grierson

12robocop(1987)

Director:Pablo Verhoeven

Throughout the late 1970s and the indulgent 1980s, "industry" became pejorative, and corporate America whitewashed all but the most functional blue-collars. Generally speaking, of course: manufacturing was booming, but the "Big Three" national auto companies in Detroit, facing astronomical gas prices through the growth of OPEC as well as increased foreign competition and decentralization of their power, they resorted to drastic costs. cutting measures, investing in automation (which naturally put thousands of people out of work, closing several factories) and relocating facilities to "low-wage" countries (further decimating all hopes of secure assembly line employment in the area ). The impact of such a tectonic shift on the very foundations of the auto industry sent aftershocks that were felt, of course, throughout the Rust Belt and Midwest, but for Detroit, whose essence seemed to be made up almost entirely of fumes. exhaust, change left town. in an ever-present state of decay. And so even though it was filmed in and around Pittsburgh and Texas, Detroit is the only logical city for arobocoplive.

A ferocious, putrid, and virtually unrivaled mix of social consciousness, ultraviolence, and existential curiosity, Paul Verhoeven's first Hollywood film made its tenor clear: a new industrial revolution must take place not within union ranks or inside halls. together, but within oneself. By 1987, much of the city was already in complete disarray, the closure of Michigan Central Station and the admission that Detroit was no longer a vital commercial hub, only a year away from its role as a poster boy for the Fall of the Western civilization had not yet gained real strength. Verhoeven cried out this notion. He made Detroit's decay tactile, visceral, and immeasurably loud, shaping it with ideas about the limits of human identity and the hilarity of consumer culture. As Verhoeven walked as a Christ-like cyborg, a veritable fusion of man and savior, through the crumbling post-apocalyptic fringes of a part of the world that once harbored so much prosperity and hope, he was not aiming for the hellscape of the world. future. detroit. . not as the battlefield on which the working class will fight against the greedy 1%, but for the robot cop, for Murphy (Peter Weller), as the battlefield for himself. How can any of us save a place like Detroit? In itrobocopIt's a deeply personal matter.—Sinacola House

11Matrix(1999)

Directors:The Wachowskis

There is little to add to what has already been scrambled about the movie that made cyberpunk no nonsense and thus the greatest cyberpunk movie of all time, amidst its many achievements, or that made Keanu Reeves in a respectable figure in the world. who eventually made martial arts movies a very popular commodity outside of Asia.Matrixis, along with the Wu-Tang Clan, what proved to a new generation that martial arts movies were worth looking at, and on that reputation are built the college classes, hero's journeys, and impossible expectations of special effects. . Even today we have this film to thank for much of what we love about modern kinetic cinema, for how malleable the genius of science fiction can be, for how deep our connection to myth-making, to the religiosity of symbols of civilization. This is our red pill; everything else is an illusion of grandeur and everything else is an allusion to what the Wachowskis achieved, including the two sequels, bloated and beautiful and unlike anything one would expect from the relatively independent original, which in turn have earned themselves the distinction of setting the course. for each multi-part franchise (i.e.,Lord of the Ringsand the MCU) to come -sinacola house

10oh pier(1962)

Director:Chris Marker

With only 28 minutes,oh pierit's somewhere between a movie and a piece of art. His concept – black-and-white photos pieced together as an omniscient narrator explains what is happening – quickly announces its symbolic purpose: a man (Davos Hanich), whose story is told to us as clearly as possible and of whom we are now a part, you can travel relatively painlessly through time due to some rigid images you carry with you from childhood. World War III decimated Paris, reducing most citizens to the hopeless status of "guinea pigs", used by scientists to design time travel experiments "to summon the past and future to rescue the present". Most helpless idiots who go back in time end up going insane, unable to mentally "hold on" to the time their minds are not conditioned to take. But the aforementioned man is stronger than they are: he is "glued to a past image of him." So what better way for a filmmaker to reliably reproduce memory than to obsess over the stillness of it? Rarely do we look at a complete detailed sequence, instead we focus on one detail, an image imprinted on our brain tissue. The man's is that of a jetty (“la jetée”), someone dying in an epic silhouette with a woman's face. It is this image that allows him to travel (without a machine) in time, to visit our “present” to anticipate his “future”. Like intwelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's haunting reimagining of Marker's film, Redirecting Fate is easier said than done. As the man faces his fate, no other movie sinceoh pierit made the concept of time travel so personal and the concept of time so sad.—Sinacola House

9.Foreign(1979)

Director:Ridley Scott

Ducts, Gutters and Sewers: Ridley Scott's ode to claustrophobia leaves little room to breathe, cramming his blue-collar archetypes into spaces too small to maintain any kind of sanity and too unforgiving to survive. WhatForeigncan also make Space -capital S- in its vastness seem as stifling as a coffin is a testament to Scott's control as a director (probably absent from much of his later work, including his insistence on inflating the myths of this first quasi- perfect movie), as well as the purity of horror and science fiction as film genres.Foreign, after all, is tension as narrative, rape as fact, using technology and imagination as powerful vessels for both. When the crew of the mining spaceshipForemanis awakened prematurely from cryogenic sleep to respond to a distress call from a seemingly lifeless planetoid, there is no doubt that the small group of working-class soldiers and their handsome science officer Ash (Ian Holm) will uncover nothing more than a increasing and supernatural doom. Things obviously, iconically, go wrong from there, and when the crew realizes what they've brought onto the ship and what their crewmates are made of, in one case, quite literally, a heroine emerges from the catastrophe: Ellen Ripley ( Sigourney Weaver), the platonic ideal of Final Girl who must battle a slimy phallic grotesque (managed by the master of the phallic grotesque, H.R. Giger) and a teammate who is basically a walking ziploc bag for a disturbing amount of seminal fluid. As Ripley crawls through the steel bodies of the ship, in a dream, the film begins with the crew's awakening and ends with her returning to sleep.Foreignit becomes a psychosexual nightmare, an indictment of the inherently masculine act of colonization, and a symbolic treatise on the trauma of assault. In space, no one can hear you scream, because no one really hears you.—Sinacola House

8.Brazil(1985)

Director:Terry Gilliam

Taking place in a dystopian future a bit sillier than Orwell's classic version (though no less sinister), the world of Terry Gilliam's 1985 film is the lovechild that results when bureaucratic nightmare meets escapist fantasy. . The result is lyrical and beautiful, as well as horrifying and haunting. Though decades of ill-fated and tumultuous productions await the Monty Python student,Brazilit remains one of the purest and most flavorful expressions of Gilliam's unique vision.—Michael Burgin

7.under the skin(2014)

Director:Jonathan Glazer

It is a rare feat for a film to successfully convey the voice of the Other.Especiallywhen that voice is an Other forallMore here on Earth. Loosely based on Michel Faber's book of the same name, director Jonathan Glazer's take onunder the skinfinds greater fascination in translating a supernatural perspective than with the fairly transparent didactics of the novel "meat is murder." This not only makes the story more interesting, but it takes the form of an experience that reminds you why the film medium is so special. Taking place in present-day Scotland, inside and outside Glasgow,under the skinfollows the face of a woman abducted by aliens (Scarlett Johansson) as she stalks and separates the men from the pack, luring them back to her lair to find an oily bane. That's just the premise: Glazer's film slowly emerges as a deeply curious meditation on what it means to be human. It may be a bit of a stretch to consider it a fitting work for Stanley Kubrick's book.2001: A Space Odyssey, but it certainly touches on a similar research topic, just in reverse. AND,WowLike Kubrick's touchstone, Glazer's film is also a visual knockout, thanks to the astonishing mix of immobility and claustrophobic disorientation captured by cinematographer Daniel Landin. And as pristine and moving as the film's visuals are, its soundtrack and sound design are more than a fitting match. Of course, any film whose story depends on a single actor, regardless of any other of its competencies, can still stumble and not recover if that actor's performance falters. But Scarlett Johansson proves time and time again that she's not just another pretty face, even if that pretty face is an extremely useful tool in portraying a deadly seductress. Throughout her persona's journey from dispassionate serial killer to vulnerable human sympathizer, Johansson strikes her targets with cold precision. Johansson's cast is also inspiring; as with David Bowie's Thomas Newton inThe man who fell to earth, the very nature of their iconic presence further drives away the notion of mere alien actors – they already soar above the clouds in their stratospheric fame.—Scott Wold

6.stalker(1979)

Director:Andrei Tarkovsky

“In the past, the future was just a continuation of the present. All your changes arrived somewhere on the horizon. But now the future is part of the present. So says the Writer (Anatoli Solonitsyn) in the work of Andrei Tarkovskystalker, somewhere in the depths of the Zone, contemplating the deepest trenches of his subconscious, of his fears and life and whatever "dirt" exists within him. "Are you ready for this?" he asks. In Tarkovsky's latest Soviet film, the director seems to admit that what he feared most has happened.

What that means is obviously confusing to a viewer who is not immersed in the director's life or in the history of the country that was familiar and hostile to him and his work for most of his life. Based very loosely onpicnic on the road, a novel by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay),stalkerimagine a dystopian future not too distant from our present - or Tarkovsky's present, before the fall of the Berlin Wall or the devastation of Chernobyl - in which some kind of supernatural force has deposited a place that humans have called "the Zone" on Earth. . There, the laws of Nature do not apply, time and space are frustrated by the hidden desires and longings of all who enter it.

Of course, the government has established cordons around the Zone and entry is strictly prohibited. Guides/liaisons called "Stalkers" lead illegal expeditions into the Zone, taking clients (often intellectual elites who can afford the trip) into the heart of the restricted, alien area, looking for, as we learn as the film slowly progresses, the so-called “Bedroom”, where a person's deepest desires come true. A Stalker (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) is hired by the aforementioned Writer and a physicist (or something like that) known only as the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) to lead them into the Zone, driven by vague ideas of what they'll find when they arrive. the room. The audience is pitch black, and through Tarkovsky's patient (almost intolerable) photographs, the three men discover, as do those who watch the ride, what really drove them to such a terrible extreme as hiring a criminal. spirit to guide them. the almost certain destruction of whatever the Zone has waiting for them.

And yet no context adequately prepares the viewer for the hypnotic, harrowing experience of watching.stalker. Between the sepia wasteland outside the Zone (so detailed in its grime and suspended squalor that you may need to shower afterwards) and the oversaturated greens and blues of the wreckage within, Tarkovsky moves almost imperceptibly, following the rhythms of industry and empty breaks. .of post-industrial life to the point of making the almost mystical manifest overwhelmingly. Throughout this tug-of-war, there's a growing sense of escape, of Tarkovsky escaping the Soviet Union and his restrictions in his films, perhaps, as much as there's a sense that you should never try to escape. Some freedom, some knowledge, the director seems to say, is not for us.—Sinacola House

5.Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope(1977)

Director:jorge lucas

BeforeStar Wars, science fiction inhabited a very different cinematic landscape. Except some movies like John Carpenterblack Star, these imagined realities tended to be pristine, brilliant, and generally fantastic. HeStar WarsThe Universe, on the other hand, placed the audience in a story that was already in progress, in a setting that felt incredibly thought out, organic, and lived-in. Things get dirty. HeMillenium FalconIt's full of bumps and knocks, just as worn as a real world vehicle would be. It may seem strange to use the word "realistic" to describe the visual side of George Lucas's space opera, but the setting forStar Warsit just felt more authentic than its predecessors, and that's an often-overlooked element of what made it such a cultural phenomenon, along with, of course, its groundbreaking FX work. The people who really had their work cut out for them were filmmakers who wanted to make science fiction in a post-war era.Star Warsworld. The expectation bar has been raised to exponential heights.—Jim Vorel

4.aliens(1986)

Director:James Cameron

James Cameron colonizes ideas: every breathtakingly beautiful show he puts together functions as a pointillist representation of the genres it inhabits: sci-fi, horror, adventure, suspense, its many wonderful set pieces and a swarm of world-building details, combining to grow exponentially. . , to inevitably overshadow theabsencedeep down, the doubt that perhaps all this great film production hides a lack of substance within the stories that Cameron tells. An early example of this pilgrim privilege is Cameron's sequel to Ridley Scott's quasi-feminist horror masterpiece, in which Cameron largely dismisses Scott's figurative (and uncomfortably intimate) interrogation of male violence in order to transmute that desire in bureaucracy and corporatism that only served as a shadow of authoritarianism -and therefore specter of the masculine imperative- in the first film. Cameron destroys Scott's world but also neutralizes it, never connecting Weyland-Yutani Corporation's lines of aggression with the masculinity of the military-industrial complex, but never tolerating that masculinity, nor that complex. Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver) story about what happened at theForemanin the first film she is questioned because she is a woman, of course, but mainly because the story spells disaster for the corporation's nefarious plans. Private Vasquez's (Jennette Goldstein) place in the Colonial Marine unit sent to LV-426 to investigate the elimination of a human colony is reviled but never fully questioned, her strength compared to her peers quite obvious. From the beginning. Instead, by casting Ripley as an action hero/mother figure whose ultimate battle is to protect her surrogate daughter from the horror of another mother figure, Cameron isn't playing with themes of rape or the role of women in a big picture. economic. hierarchy, he is placing women by default at the forefront of humanity's future war for or against the ineffable forces of capitalism. It is a magnificent blockbuster and one of the first films to redefine what a franchise can be within the confines of a new director's voice and vision, but underneath all the wondrous imagination and splendor based on the genre, Cameron doesn't have much to say. nothing. say. Still, it's an amazing movie in spite of itself, a tense action bonanza and a good reminder of all those years and overtures.avatarsequences after Cameron has clearly decided which side of the war he is fighting on.—Sinacola House

3.Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back(1980)

Director:Irvin Kershner

The Empire Strikes Backis Exhibit A in the category of sequels that surpass the original, taking the wonderful world we were grantedA new hopeand deepening, expanding its reach in all directions. He develops the idea of ​​the “Rebel Alliance,” showing us how this band of freedom fighters operates as they slowly win the ideological battle and attract more support for their cause. Each character experiences positive growth: Leia (Carrie Fisher) transforms from “princess” figure to military commander and tireless organizer of a resistance; Han (Harrison Ford) has become a leader of men, completing the transition he began when he returned to help destroy the Death Star inA new hope; and Luke (Mark Hamill) finally begins the path to becoming a true Jedi. His Dagobah scenes with Yoda are fraught with foreshadowing and foreshadowing; never on the show do the arcane mysteries of the Force seem so enticing as when Luke levitates rocks and digests philosophy. The mysticism and wonder ofStar Warsare at their peak inEmpire.

Elsewhere, the series' space piloting scenes have their most chilling moment when the Falcon dodges asteroids and the T.I.E. fighters The petty feuds of the Imperial Navy and its endless parade of dead officers give us a glimpse into the structure of the enemy. A colorful assortment of bounty hunters gather. A classic romance blossoms. It all evolves into what is perhaps the biggest "Oh my gosh!" reveal in the history of cinema, completely redefining the public's perception of all the events that preceded it. it's hard to imagineEmpirewill never be overthrown as the greatestStar Warsmovie of all time, but if it is in any way, it will indeed be a major disruption in the Force.—Jim Vorel

2.Rewarded accommodation(1982)

Director:Ridley Scott

As well asThe road warriorit set the look and tone for countless post-apocalyptic movie settings that followed, as well as the dark, dank, and overcrowded world of Ridley Scott.Rewarded accommodationset the standard for depicting pre-apocalyptic dystopias. But it also featured Harrison Ford, Sean Young, Rutger Hauer and a cast of actors bringing this Philip K. Dick-inspired story of a replicant cop retiring to a gritty, believable life. Beneath the film's stunning setting and inspired performances is a haunting meditation on the lurking loneliness of the human (and, perhaps, inhuman) condition that continues to resonate (and spark new creations, like Villeneuve's film).Blade Runner 2049) until today.—Michael Burgin

1.2001: A Space Odyssey(1968)

Director:Stanley Kubrick

Fifty years ago, Stanley Kubrick told the story of it all: of life, the universe, pain and loss, and how reality and time change as we, these puny travelers, navigate through it all, trying to Change Everything, Not Knowing Whether to Change Anything Written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke (whose novel, conceived along with the screenplay, was released shortly after the film's release),2001: A Space Odysseyit begins with the origins of the human race and ends with the dawn of all that comes after us, swirling over our planet, like a god, a seemingly omniscient and hopefully benevolent space fetus from the fifth dimension, spanning countless light-years. and millennia between them. And yet, despite their ambitious leaps and almost incomprehensible scope, each of Kubrick's lofty symbolic gestures coincides with a moment of intimate humanity: the sadness of the death of a powerful intellect; the impact of cold-blooded murder; the minutiae and tedium of keeping our bodies running on a daily basis; the struggle and wonder of finding something we can't explain; the unspoken need to survive, never questioned because it will never be answered. Much more than a speculative document on the human race colonizing the Solar System,2001Questionwhywe do what we do - why, against so many opposing forces, seen and unseen, do we push beyond the fringes of all we know, all we need to know? In the midst of long shots of bodies traversing space, of spaceships and cosmonauts floating silently through the unknown, Kubrick finds grace - aided, of course, by an epic classical soundtrack that today we cannot separate from the indelible visuals. Kubrick's - and in grace finds purpose: if we can transcend our earthly roots with curiosity and courage, then we must. The fact that the end of Kubrick's odyssey brings us back to the beginning only reaffirms that purpose: we are, and always have been, the navigators of our destiny.—Sinacola House