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TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’ (1957)
Cheapie sci-fi giant of the Eisenhower era Jack Arnold (It Came From Outer Space, Creature From the Black Lagoon) went small with this simple story of a man (Grant Williams) who shrinks to a height of two inches after he’s exposed to a zeitgeisty cloud of pesticide and radiation. The main set pieces, involving a snarling house cat, a spider, and a gushing water heater, are gems of scale that get the most from primitive visual effects. But it’s the lonely, existential tone that lingers longest, as our miniscule Everyman ponders life as a near-invisible speck of humanity. The ending is both understated and uncompromising. —CV
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Dark Star’ (1974)
Director John Carpenter and screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, the creative forces behind (respectively) The Thing remake and Alien, made their feature debuts with this sci-fi cult comedy. The central conceit is simple but ingenious: What if being in space wasn’t an experience of wide-eyed wonderment, but instead was just really fucking boring? The scouting ship Dark Star is 20 years into its mission, all but falling apart. So its crew of stoners and surfers is particularly ill-equipped to deal with an admittedly low-pressure alien on board. Carpenter used his micro-budget of $60,000 to his advantage, creating a lived-in, rinky-dink, working-class vision of intergalactic travel that O’Bannon and director Ridley Scott adroitly carried over to their big-budget tale of working-class spaceship grunts and a killer extraterrestrial. This groundbreaker, on the other hand, was barely seen upon its release, but eventually made its way to a destiny of fuzzy VHS viewings by snickering potheads and weirdos. —JB
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Cloverfield’ (2008)
Long before the TikTok Get-Ready-With-Me era, director Matt Reeves posited a nightmare fuel scenario for all New Yorkers: If the world ends on your last night in town, how long would you keep filming? As if the decapitated head of the Statue of Liberty flung onto a Soho street or the Brooklyn bridge snapping one cord at a time wasn’t enough, this kaiju-runs-amuck film manages to infuse itself with prescient anxieties around surveillance states and self-destruction— something that seems impossible to fit into a movie that also has dozens of parasitic monsters that explode people’s bodies from the inside out. But it’s the way this sci-fi horror gem used first-person shaky cam to reimagine into a decades-old template that turned into an instant classic. —CTJ
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Earth vs. the Flying Saucers’ (1956)
The title says it all: Our big blue marble is under attack from aliens in big, silver UFOs! And only scientist Hugh Marlowe, his new wife Joan Taylor, and the U.S. military can stop them! One of the giddier, more deliriously fun entries in the “watch the skies!” sci-fi cycle of the 1950s, this pristine piece of Saturday matinee pulp feels like a vintage Amazing Stories magazine cover come to life, right down to the aliens’ oddly edgeless metal suits. And the climax, in which numerous flying saucers destroy Washington D.C. monuments — and crash into the Capital Building — is a great reminder of why Ray Harryhausen was the best thing to happen to genre movies in the 20th century. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Scanners’ (1981)
How confident was David Cronenberg in the 1981 film that would become his mainstream breakthrough? He included a scene of a man’s head exploding within the first 15 minutes then assumed he could top one of the most shocking images ever put to film. Inspired by the work of Philip K. Dick, the film follows a man named Cameron Vale (Stephen Lack) with psychic powers he can’t explain or control. He then plunges into an underworld of similarly gifted/cursed individuals, and his journey reveals both a thalidomide-like drug and a corporate power struggle via a trip through conspiratorial paranoia that explores what it means to be human — and perhaps transcend humanity — along the way. —KP
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Blade Runner 2049’ (2017)
Denis Villeneuve finally gives Ridley Scott’s 1982 landmark the belated sequel it deserves, with Harrison “Deckard” Ford and Ryan “K” Gosling’s facing-off as blade runners past and present. Blade Runner 2049 often feels like both an opportunity to continue the story of the original and update its look, shifting tones from the original’s cluttered, downtown neon glow to a less fraught yet equally compelling palette of neutral colors and tones. It’s a gorgeously shot movie, from nighttime sequences bathed in fluorescent light to dusty, washed-out landscapes of cities in ruin, earning Roger Deakins a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography. Joining Gosling are Sylvia Hoecks as a replicant tracking his quest to find a mysterious child, as well as Robin Wright as his human commander and Ana de Armas as his holographic yet seemingly real girlfriend. Meanwhile, Jared Leto’s essential weirdness serves him well as a blindly corrupt industrialist. —MR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’ (1986)
An endangered Earth, time travel on a Klingon warbird, and a pair of humpback whales all figure into the plot of the fourth Star Trek installment — an entry that, to this day, divides hardcore Trekkers with its lighthearted, sometimes goofy, tone. For the record, beam us up: The Voyage Home is a winning hoot. Credit that to the performances of the core cast, especially William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForest Kelley, who as Kirk, Spock, and Bones, respectively, try their best to assimilate in late-Eighties San Francisco after warping through time. Shatner in particular is a gem as he struggles to learn the art of swearing. (“A double dumb ass on you!” he hollers at a cabbie.) Eventually, he and the crew find the whales that’ll save humanity and transport them back to the future, delivering a not-too-subtle message about environmental conservancy in the process. —JH
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Sunshine’ (2007)
Set the controls for the heart of the sun: Danny Boyle’s sci-fi opus follows a motley crew aboard the spaceship Icarus II (symbolism alert!) on a mission to jumpstart our life-giving star. Cillian Murphy is the resident physicist, in charge of the bomb that will hopefully recharge the big glowing orb. (Think of it as a trial run for this role.) Michelle Yeoh, Rose Byrne, Chris Evans, Benedict Wong, Troy Garity, Cliff Curtis and Hiroyuki Sanada are his shipmates along for the ride. It’s a 21st century chin-scratcher about our place in the universe that pays homage to an era when interstellar journeys doubled as metaphysical head trips a la Solaris, 2001, etc., with the occasional nods to a host of in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream thrillers of yesteryear as well. Boyle’s underrated film still provides a few genuinely chilling moments — and, of course, plenty of heat. DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Paprika’ (2006)
Based on a Yasutaka Tsutsui novel, this surreal animated feature is the work of the late, great director Satoshi Kon, who in his too-short life expanded the range of anime, in both subject matter and style. His final film is about a device that allows psychotherapists to examine patients by entering their subconscious — and about what happens when someone with bad intentions steals that tech and starts producing nightmares that drive the dreamer to madness. That simple premise provides the foundation for an eye-popping parade of trippy imagery, partly inspired by the illustrations in old pulp magazines. The movie is a fantastical journey into the mind, where imaginations run dangerously wild. —NM
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘THX 1138’ (1971)
Without diagnosing George Lucas’ psychology right out of graduate school, his first movie depicts a future world in which sex is forbidden, God is a computer that issues empty platitudes, and state-issued drugs are commonplace. Freud would have a field day unpacking that. His protagonist, named THX 1138 (Robert Duvall), rebels against everything, fornicating with LUH 3417 (Maggie McOmie), skipping the feds’ meds, and trying to flee the fascist state with SEN 5241 (Donald Pleasance). Visuals like the prison of boundless whiteness that THX and SEN explore and a high-speed car chase at the end remain memorable, and the movie later inspired songs by musical artists as diverse as the Misfits, Toto, and Unkle. Lucas even paid tribute to it himself with a license plate in American Graffiti. —KG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Strange Days’ (1995)
Nearly 30 years later, Kathryn Bigelow’s tech noir thriller stands as one of sci-fi’s most unnerving “memory” films, with hard-to-watch scenes of murder and rape all seen from the point of view of the attacker. On the eve of the millennium, hustler Lenny Nero (Ralph Fiennes) sells recordings on the black market that allow the viewer to experience someone else’s actions, memories, and feelings. It’s a hot commodity, and even Lenny is hooked — on memory discs featuring his ex, Faith (Juliette Lewis). But when one of the “SQUIDS,” as they’re known, captures the killing of a prostitute, Lenny finds himself in danger and perpetually on the run. The future Oscar-winning director was criticized for glamourizing sexual violence upon the movie’s release, but she was actually shining a light on unchecked power, the abuse of women, and voyeurism. That the latter remains the currency of today makes this film chillingly relevant. —JH
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Day of the Triffids’ (1963)
A meteorite shower over London burns the optic nerves of those who watch the night skies, leaving most of the population blind. Worse, it’s also dropped a number of extraterrestrial seedlings into the ground — and soon, the city is overrun with what appears to be a legion of Venus Flytraps on steroids. You’ll believe a botanical garden can be menacing! The knock on this milestone British sci-fi/horror movie has always been that killer plants can’t match up to the other terrifying creatures of the era, which is fair. Yet it’s the film’s portrait of social collapse that sells it as a truly chilling alien-invasion movie. The morning-after stroll of Howard Keel through empty hospital corridors and deadly silent streets (his eyes were bandaged after a procedure, hence he can still see) has been borrowed a thousand times over, and the sight of dozens of people staggering sightless around a metropolis is positively postapocalyptic. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Tetsuo: The Iron Man’ (1989)
The defining Japanese cyberpunk film, Shinya Tsukamoto’s Centering on a “metal fetishist” who gets revenge on the couple who ran him over with their car by transforming them into gruesome machine/human hybrids. It’s a burst of pure energy that blends Tsukamoto’s childhood love of tokusatsu-style practical FX with intense body horror for a junkyard dystopian take on the utopian transhumanism movement. This is how you make great science fiction simply by taping busted keyboards to an actor and telling him to scream. —KR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Galaxy Quest’ (1999)
What would happen if William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and the rest of the original Star Trek cast were whisked away into space years after the show’s cancellation, and forced to man an actual starship? This is essentially the premise of Dean Parisot’s meta-comedy, in which the cast of a Trek-like series (led by a cocky Tim Allen doing his best Shatner impersonation) are mistaken for IRL space heroes by an alien race that thinks the show is a documentary. It’s an affectionate ribbing of both cult sci-fi TV and its fans. And the attempt of Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, and a delightfully bitchy Alan Rickman to maneuver through this situation are way more enjoyable to watch than a number of Star Trek movies. —AG
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Nope’ (2022)
Jordan Peele’s third movie could be described as an alien invasion tale in the spirit of War of the Worlds. But that shorthand would miss wonderfully peculiar touches like a Black family that’s wrangled horses for showbiz since the dawn of cinema or a Gold Rush-themed amusement park or sitcom cancelled after an on-set rampage by a chimpanzee. A flying saucer isn’t secondary to all these elements, but Nope puts the threat of a UFO on the same uncanny footing as the Hollywood outsiders and misfits who have been summoned to combat it. For Peele to pack these ideas into a sci-fi summer blockbuster that still delivers is, frankly, a 21st century auteur flex. —Scott Tobias
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘High Life’ (2018)
Claire Denis’ sweaty, cloistered chinscratcher diverts a plot about Earth criminals sentenced to participate in a suicidal space mission to a black hole — a motley lot that includes Robert Pattinson, Andre 3000, Mia Goth, and others — into a meditation on the perils of intimacy. Abandon hope, ye in hope of a 2001-styled cosmic treatise. Instead, she focuses on her protagonists’ humanity as they hurtle towards their doom and wrestle with the aftereffects of government scientist Juliette Binoche’s bizarre sexual experiments. It’s a film that doesn’t set out to shock or awe — it simply delights in its insights on the frailty of life in the cosmos. —MR
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Donnie Darko’ (2001)
Call it the In the Aeroplane Over the Sea of sci-fi flicks — a personal, dense, left-of-center work that time (and a fervent fan base) helped turn into a modern touchstone. Richard Kelly’s gloriously odd cult film about time travel, toothy rabbit-costumed doomsayers, ’80s references and a misfit named Donnie (Jake Gyllenhaal) who thinks he’s getting hints about the end of the world is most definitely an acquired taste. But its skewed look at suburban America and scarred psyches make it an intriguing and eerily prescient work, one that had the misfortune of coming out right after 9/11 yet somehow anticipated the PTSD mindset of that moment’s aftermath. —DF
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘The Host’ (2006)
How often do the characters in a kaiju movie hold as much interest as the abomination looming over them? That’s the rare feat of what Bong Joon-Ho thrillingly fishes from the Godzilla gene pool: the story of a dysfunctional Seoul family realigning after its youngest is kidnapped by an amphibious something that comes bounding, spectacularly, out of the Han River. As in his Oscar-winning Parasite, Bong deftly juggles genres — a little drama, a little comedy, a little blockbuster action — while foregrounding his political conscience. Like the Ishirō Honda classic from which it evolved, his creature feature par excellence has ideas pinging around its lizard brain, even as it offers a CGI monster so nifty and singular you can safely appreciate the whole thing on the uncomplicated level of “SKREEEEE-EEEEEONGK.” —AAD
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’ (2001)
Steven Spielberg was already toggling between his “serious movie” phase and his crowd-pleaser mode at the start of the 21st century — and this tricky futuristic, hard sci-fi fable, which openly undercuts the optimism of E.T. and Close Encounters, attempts to balance both sides. Based on a Brian Aldiss short story that was one of the late Stanley Kubrick’s abandoned projects, A.I. tells the story of an ultra-realistic robot boy (played by Haley Joel Osment) who’s abandoned by his human masters and left to search the world to learn his purpose. At once dazzling and despairing, the film is a sprawling odyssey that asks what makes us human – and doesn’t offer many reassuring answers. —NM
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Total Recall’ (1990)
From Blade Runner to Inception, sci-fi films have often explored the idea of implanted memories. But few succeeded in making it such a fun mindfuck as Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 adaptation of a Philip K. Dick short story. Arnold Schwarzenegger is Quaid, an everyman construction worker in 2084 fed up with his job, his wife, and his life. He takes a mental vacation to Mars via a company that administers realistic yet supposedly safe memories. Except that’s not the case for Ahnold, who finds himself questioning his very identity when the procedure goes awry: Is he the blue-collar Quaid or a secret agent called Hauser? And is his wife, a devilish Sharon Stone, out to save him or kill him? The old-school but meticulous special effects will make some fans pine for the days before CGI, especially when Quaid visits sci-fi’s most outrageous freak show since Star Wars’ cantina: the X-rated Venusville. —JH
TOP SCIFI MOVIES
‘Ghost in the Shell’ (1995)
“The advance of computerization, however, has not yet wiped out nations and ethnic groups.” So ends the epigraph that opens Mamoru Oshii’s eternally stylish cyberpunk noir, which rejects the lie that technology will lead to a post-racial utopia, free of hierarchy and animus. In fact, the tomorrow visions of today feel like they’re still playing catch up to this landmark anime — from its sleek pancultural worldbuilding (a major influence on live-action and cartoon dystopias alike) to its savvy, somehow pre-internet-age understanding of the ways that people have willingly ceded their identities to the machines. As technothrillers continue to quiver and glitch with the anxiety of a world going fully digital, here’s one that takes the mechanization of its more-human-than-human heroine completely in stride. After all, why fear a future that’s already arrived? —AAD
Electric Eel (Electrophorus electricus) is an Amazonian fish capable of generating electric shocks for navigation and hunting
Triggerfish (Balistidae) is recognized for its unique, trigger-like dorsal fin used for locking itself in crevices for protection
There are about 2 chickens for every human in the world.
The word “maverick” came into use after Samuel Maverick, a Texan refused to brand his cattle.
Two-thirds of the world’s eggplant is grown in New Jersey.
Termites have been known to eat food twice as fast when heavy metal music is playing.
There are more beetles than any other animal. In fact, one out of every four animals is a beetle.
The rhinoceros beetle is the strongest animal and is capable of lifting 850 times its own weight.
On a Canadian two-dollar bill, the American flag is flying over the Parliament Building.