While they’re often dismissed for being too “genre,” there are some science-fiction movies that rank among the greatest masterpieces ever put on film: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, Metropolis, Blade Runner – the list goes on. The most renowned sci-fi movies, like Inception and The Matrix and Back to the Future, have been seen by everyone and are widely regarded to be classics of the genre.
But occasionally, a great movie comes along that goes unnoticed by audiences, either because it gets overshadowed by another movie or the marketing doesn’t sell how great it is or another reason altogether. Discovering hidden gems never gets old.
10 Beyond The Black Rainbow
Before putting Nicolas Cage through a gonzo form of hell in Mandy, Panos Cosmatos put Eva Allan through a gonzo form of hell in Beyond the Black Rainbow.
Allan plays a heavily sedated woman with extrasensory perception who’s been trapped on a commune and desperately tries to escape.
9 Annihilation
Alex Garland’s second directorial effort didn’t quite capture the moviegoing public in the same way his acclaimed debut feature, Ex Machina, did. This is partly because the studio got cold feet about its theatrical release and sold its distribution rights off to Netflix in many countries.
But it’s a dazzling opus of sci-fi horror, starring Natalie Portman as the leader of a team sent into a strange alien dimension that’s begun growing on Earth. It has one of the most haunting finales in recent memory.
8 Gattaca
From the mind of The Truman Show’s Andrew Niccol, Gattaca takes place in a future world in which eugenics is commonplace. It’s about a man who dreams of going to space and steals somebody else’s identity in the hopes of making that dream come true.
Led by terrific performances by Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman, Gattaca is a rare big-budget Hollywood sci-fi movie that’s more interested in being thought-provoking than action-packed.
7 Attack The Block
A few years before John Boyega would become a globally recognized star from the Star Wars sequel trilogy, he starred in a little-seen British sci-fi comedy called Attack the Block, which focuses on a street gang’s attempts to survive during an alien invasion.
Director Joe Cornish keeps the plot moving at a brisk pace, while the design of the aliens with black fur and neon-lit eyes is pretty terrifying.
6 Another Earth
Mike Cahill’s Another Earth might be slow-paced, but it’s almost as cerebral and profound as a Tarkovsky movie (not quite as profound, of course – Tarkovsky is the guy for profundity on the big screen).
It’s about the discovery of a duplicate Earth in our solar system, but that takes place in the background. It’s really about the relationship of a young student and a bereaved composer who cross paths in a terrible accident on the night the new Earth is discovered.
5 The Host
Bong Joon-ho’s Snowpiercer and Okja have been praised as recent sci-fi masterpieces, but another one of his great works in the genre that got swept under the rug is The Host.
Like all of the director’s films, The Host is thematically about the class divide. In this case, Bong layers the social commentary over the familiar structure of a monster movie.
4 Dredd
Karl Urban will probably never get to reprise his role as Judge Dredd, since his R-rated big-screen outing as the character bombed at the box office. But Dredd is one of the best comic book adaptations of the past decade, encapsulating the essence of the character as well as providing plenty of suitably brutal violence.
Following the scaled-back story of Dredd and a young recruit infiltrating a high-rise controlled by a drug lord, Dredd is both a visual treat and a well-told parable about authoritarianism.
3 High Life
Directed by the great Claire Denis, High Life stars Robert Pattinson as an astronaut on a dangerous mission to the farthest reaches of the solar system.
When the mission goes south, he and his infant daughter are the only survivors. As they speed toward a black hole, the two rely on each other for survival.
2 The Lobster
Yorgos Lanthimos has quickly made a name for himself as a guy who makes great movies that are also super weird. The weirdness usually contributes to what makes them so great. His breakout English-language film was The Lobster, a morbid satire of the dating world.
Colin Farrell stars as a recent divorcee living in a world where single people are turned into animals. He goes to a resort to find love and if he can’t, he’ll be transformed into a lobster.
1 Under The Skin
Scarlett Johansson gives one of her all-time finest performances in Under the Skin as an alien who comes to Earth and uses the facade of a beautiful woman to lure unsuspecting men back to her lair, where they sink into the floor and get folded into oblivion.
This disturbing little cult classic has some fascinating musings on humanity, like a scene in which the alien observes a tragedy unfolding on the beach from afar.