What are the best science fiction movies ?

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The science-fiction movie genre is as expansive as the galaxy. Ever since the age when technology meant little more than a lensed metal tube that could peer into the sky, we've used technological advances to realize our dreams and nightmares. Now a model spaceship or two can turn a Western into a sci-fi classic; an experimental process is all a romantic drama needs to become far-thinking speculative fiction.

Hard to Be a God In the movie, scientists leave Earth to study a planet stuck in a repressive dark age. Forbidden to directly interfere with society, one scientist sets himself up as a baron, the better to observe the people. But even his god-like status can’t insulate him from the ignorant, violent, and just plain dirty lives around him.

Phase IV, This movie, the lone directorial effort from celebrated poster and title designer Saul Bass, is like a hundred amazing sci-fi book and magazine covers brought to life. A slight story, about the cosmically-induced evolution in ants, justifies Bass’ brilliantly trippy images. Phase IV is a film to get lost in, the sort of pure experience that thrives in the framework of genre film, and its under-the-radar status can be partially explained by the trimming of Bass’s original ending, a four-minute sequence involving a labyrinth of graphics, and the eventual merging of man and insect, that is the apex of his design efforts.

eXistenZ David Cronenberg applies his personal signature to gaming in this story of a game designer, her vaguely biological new console, and an immersive, interactive campaign that provokes assassination attempts and blurs identity.

Timecrimes is perhaps the most elegantly vicious time-travel movie ever made. Middle-class Héctor spies a naked woman behind the country house he shares with his wife, then seeks out the young woman when his wife steps away.

Aliens arrive on Earth only to be corralled into a giant shantytown ghetto, overseen and exploited by sniveling clipboard jockeys like Sharlto Copley’s Wickus. It’s impossible to miss the metaphor about apartheid in this feature debut from South African writer/director Neill Blomkamp (Chappie), but it’s as effective as it is blatant.

Jean-Luc Godard discards the superficial trappings of sci-fi -- gleaming sets, tech-heavy props and wild costumes -- for this noir tale of a detective out to destroy the autocratic computer overlord, Alpha 60, which has outlawed emotion in Alphaville.

The film’s other trick, adopting actor Eddie Constantine’s long-running detective character Lemmy Caution as the lead, doesn’t play as well now as it did in 1965, as popular culture has left Caution behind.

No film has managed to so successfully navigate two separate genres at the same time as Blade Runner. Based on a Philip K Dick novel, Blade Runner is both a science fiction masterpiece and a film noir magnum opus. With themes ranging from the illusion of memory, the questioning of identity, and basic human mortality, director Ridley Scott took a script that passed through more hands than the Hope diamond and created a legendary work of cinema.

Taking “Groundhog Day” and giving it a sci-fi twist (more effectively than Duncan Jones’ “Source Code” a few years earlier), Doug Liman’s excellent blockbuster “Edge Of Tomorrow” picks up Tom Cruise’s dickish PR guy and drops him in the midst of a D-Day-style battle against an impossible alien threat, then makes him live it (and perish in it) over and over again

Amazingly, it’s been nearly 15 years since Richard Kelly’s indie genre-bender arrived, and though its legacy has been tarnished by an inferior Director’s Cut and the helmer’s questionable follow-ups, the film remains as original and enjoyable a creation as ever.

The premise of kids killing each other in a government-supported game has now been popularized to billion-dollar effect with the (very good) “Hunger Games” franchise, but if we were going to choose one film in this tiny sub-genre, it was always going to be “Battle Royale.

Perhaps one of the most hotly contested films, sci-fi or otherwise, in recent memory, Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” received a host of polarizing and emotionally hot reactions. Some claimed the picture his worst (our review wasn’t very charitable), some thought it was a vision from the heavens, and as usual, when the dust has settled, more mannered judgments have taken root (more of a consensus Playlist opinion forms here).

After Tim Burton’s dreadful 2001 version, few had high hopes for the second reboot of the classic “Planet Of The Apes” series in a decade when Rupert Wyatt’s “Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes” arrived. But the film was a quiet, unexpectedly moving triumph, and was then exceeded on every front by Matt Reeves’ follow-up, one of the few sequels that trumps the original.

Alphaville is as much an experimental noir as it is speculative fiction, steeped in the tropes of the former while blissfully tinkering with the world of the latter, never quite justifying the hybridizing of both but never quite caring, either.

Barbarella was a unique film when it was released in 1968, and it remains something very unusual as it celebrates its 50th anniversary: A blend of science fiction, fantasy and erotica that plays all three both campy and straight, depending on its mood.

Sleeper’s sci-fi slapstick is Woody Allen comedy at the peak of the legendary filmmaker’s powers. Miles Monroe (Allen), as a cryogenically unfrozen man out of time, is drafted into an underground resistance movement against a tyrannical, robot-enforced police state.

A pre-disaster-porn Roland Emmerich directed this (intentionally?) campy, conspiracy-minded sci-fi yarn—a film probably better remembered via the television franchise it spawned—and it’s an odd duck for sure. James Spader plays an Egyptologist savant who cracks the code to open the titular gate, while Kurt Russell growls at space aliens in the guise of ancient Egyptian deities.

During the ’80s, John Sayles established himself as a smart indie writer/director with a knack for social commentary, but only one of his films embedded said commentary into a zany sci-fi plot. The result is the story of a mute alien who looks like a black man with weird feet, who crash-lands in Harlem and meets and observes the people of New York City.

Two years after Alien, Peter Hyams blew up the blue-collar subtext of Ridley Scott’s grimy mining vessel politics to remake High Noon in space. In perhaps his noblest role, Sean Connery plays Federal Marshal William O’Niel, a rigorous do-gooder assigned to duty shepherding the motley crew of titanium ore miners inhabiting a station on the Jupiter moon of Io.

First-time director Duncan Jones is overt about his stylistic appropriations of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, right down to the sweeping orchestral music that frames the opening shots of the titular satellite and Earth.

Galaxy Quest is a film about equilibrium between love and parody; a movie made with less of the former and too much of the latter becomes a mean-spirited dunk on sci-fi fandom, and a movie made in the reverse becomes too much about fan service than honest-to-goodness storytelling

Though John Carpenter’s The Thing steeped the then-terrifyingly mysterious AIDS crisis in otherworldly horror five years before, The Hidden indulges in similar tropes and identical themes with blunter, no-less-pulpier mayhem.

Long before there was Jurassic Park (or the increasingly frustrating Westworld HBO series, for that matter), Michael Crichton wrote (and directed) the story of another disastrous theme park: Delos, housing the sophisticated amusement android characters of Westworld, Medievalworld and Romanworld.