Boarding-school children raised as organ donors; Ishiguro's quiet dystopia.
Scarlett Johansson as an alien picking up men in Glasgow, filmed with hidden cameras.
A talking raccoon, a tree and a Walkman; Marvel's space opera comedy.
Aliens in a Johannesburg township; Blomkamp's apartheid allegory as documentary sci-fi.
Pandora, the Na'vi and the 3D film that became the highest-grossing ever.
Tom Cruise dies and repeats a D-Day against aliens; Groundhog Day as a war film.
A wedding and a planet on a collision course with Earth; von Trier on depression.
Gordon-Levitt hunts his older self, Bruce Willis; Rian Johnson's time-travel noir.
Six stories across five centuries with the same actors; the Wachowskis and Tykwer's huge gamble.
Sandra Bullock alone in orbit after the debris hits; Cuaron's 13-minute opening shot.
A programmer tests whether Ava is conscious in a glass house in the mountains.
A dead Detroit cop rebuilt as a machine; Verhoeven's satire wrapped in an action film.
Jim Carrey's whole life is a TV show; the door in the sky.
Schwarzenegger's commandos hunted by an invisible alien in the jungle; "get to the chopper".
Schwarzenegger as an unstoppable machine from 2029; "I'll be back".
A boy and a giant robot in Cold War Maine; "Superman".
Liquid metal, a good Terminator and the biggest budget yet spent; the sequel that beat the original.
Gilliam's bureaucratic dystopia of ducts and paperwork, with a heating engineer as terrorist.
Schwarzenegger on Mars, a three-breasted woman and an eyeball-popping ending; Verhoeven and Philip K. Dick.
A giant rabbit tells a teenager the world ends in 28 days; the cult film of 2001.
Manhattan as a prison and Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken; Carpenter's dystopia of 1997.
A TV executive finds a snuff broadcast and his body starts changing; "long live the new flesh".
The original, a black-and-white elegy for Hiroshima in the shape of a monster.
An Antarctic base and a shape-shifter; Rob Bottin's effects and the paranoia of the blood test.
Pod people replace a Californian town; the Cold War paranoia film that still works.
Lang's 1927 city of the future: the Maschinenmensch, the workers below and a look every sci-fi film borrowed.
The Skywalker saga closes with Palpatine back and Rey choosing a name.
Cameron turns Scott's horror into a war film: Ripley, the marines and the queen.
Ripley cloned two hundred years on, in a Joss Whedon script shot by Jeunet.
A lonely writer falls in love with an operating system, in a very warm Los Angeles.
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