The 10 Best Sci-Fi Movies of All Time, Ranked

The TML Score is our own number, run across every film in the database, that blends critical standing, audience response, and staying power, meaning how often a film still gets cited, remade, ripped off, or dragged back into the conversation years after release. Run it against every science fiction title we've got and the results tilt toward films that use the genre to ask a real question rather than just build a bigger universe. You can see the formula working in the gap between the 93 sitting on Metropolis below and the 89 on Bride of Frankenstein: both changed the genre, but Metropolis didn't just influence science fiction filmmaking, it invented a visual vocabulary, the vertical city, the machine double of a human woman, that every dystopian skyline since has been quoting, knowingly or not.

One name worth flagging: Andrei Tarkovsky lands twice on this list. That's not a fluke in the formula, it's the formula doing exactly what it's built to do. The genre's highest marks tend to go to films that treat science fiction as philosophy first and spectacle a distant second.

A list like this will get flagged for who's missing as much as who's on it. There's no 2001: A Space Odyssey, no Blade Runner, no Matrix, no Terminator 2, and that's worth owning rather than explaining away later. Those films rewired what science fiction blockbusters look like, and any of them would top most best of lists built purely around influence on the genre's imagery and craft. The TML Score just tends to reward something slightly different: films you can rewatch and still find new, rather than films you saw once and never forgot. Ten other titles edged them out on that particular measure. Keep reading and you'll see the pattern.

The 10 best sci-fi movies, ranked

1. Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang. TML Score 93. Lang built an entire vertical city, laborers grinding away in the depths, a glittering elite lounging above them, then set a robotic double of his heroine loose to burn the whole arrangement down. For decades the film only survived in butchered form; a damaged print turned up in a museum in Buenos Aires and let restorers piece back roughly 25 minutes that had been missing since its original run. Watch on Amazon
2. Bride of Frankenstein (1935), James Whale. TML Score 89. Elsa Lanchester plays two parts, Mary Shelley in the framing prologue and the shrieking, lightning streaked Bride herself, and somehow the film comes out stranger and funnier than the 1931 original it's continuing. By most accounts Whale wasn't eager to make a sequel at all; nothing about how confidently he stages the ending gives that away. Watch on Amazon
3. Solaris (1972), Andrei Tarkovsky. TML Score 89. A psychologist is sent to a station orbiting a planet that seems to read minds and rebuild the dead, and his estranged wife turns up in the flesh, or in something built to look and feel exactly like her. It's adapted from Stanislaw Lem's novel, and Lem was reportedly unhappy that Tarkovsky pushed the story toward grief and romance instead of the colder question his book was asking: whether people could ever really understand a genuinely alien intelligence. Watch on Amazon
4. Stalker (1979), Andrei Tarkovsky. TML Score 87. Three men, a guide the others call Stalker and two he calls the Writer and the Professor, cross into a restricted zone in search of a room rumored to grant your deepest wish, and Tarkovsky shoots the walk there like it could kill them at any step. The production nearly did him in too: a batch of film stock was ruined during processing, and much of what ended up on screen had to be shot again from nothing. Watch on Amazon
5. Donnie Darko (2001), Richard Kelly. TML Score 87. Kelly's debut opens with a jet engine falling out of a clear sky and crushing a teenager's bedroom, an image that made the film a hard sell when it opened just weeks after September 11. It barely registered in theaters and found its real audience later, on video and through word of mouth, which suits a movie about a kid convinced the world is ending on a countdown only he can see. Watch on Amazon
6. Back to the Future (1985), Robert Zemeckis. TML Score 86. Michael J. Fox almost wasn't in it. Eric Stoltz played Marty McFly for several weeks of production before Zemeckis and Steven Spielberg decided the tone was wrong and recast the role, reshooting most of what had already been filmed. You'd never guess any of that watching Fox skate through the town square like he's owned it his whole life. Watch on Amazon
7. Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind (1984), Hayao Miyazaki. TML Score 86. This technically predates Studio Ghibli, the studio wasn't founded until the following year, but everything Ghibli would become is already on screen: a fierce, curious heroine, a poisoned forest that isn't simply evil, giant insects that turn out to be less dangerous than the humans fighting over the land they live on. Miyazaki adapted it from his own manga, and its success is generally credited as the reason Ghibli got to exist at all. Watch on Amazon
8. Alien (1979), Ridley Scott. TML Score 86. H.R. Giger's creature design still does most of the work: something that reads as sexual and mechanical at once, with no motive beyond staying alive, loose on a cargo ship full of blue collar astronauts who spend their first scenes arguing about pay. The chestburster scene is the one everybody remembers, and the horror on the actors' faces reads as real because, by most accounts, most of the cast hadn't been told exactly what was about to happen. Watch on Amazon
9. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), George Miller. TML Score 85. Miller shot the whole thing as one extended chase across the desert and famously worked from thousands of hand drawn storyboard panels instead of a conventional script, so the crew could see the geography of a stunt before wrecking a real, practically built car to pull it off. There's almost no dead air in two hours. Watch on Amazon
10. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Michel Gondry. TML Score 85. Charlie Kaufman's screenplay, credited alongside Gondry and Pierre Bismuth, won the Academy Award, and it earns the honor with a memory erasure gimmick, Jim Carrey paying a company to wipe every trace of Kate Winslet from his brain, that lets the film run backward through a relationship instead of forward. The science fiction premise is barely the point. It's a breakup movie wearing a lab coat. Watch on Amazon

If we ran this as a top eleven, 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the film we'd slot in next: high enough on our own numbers to make the case, not quite high enough to crack the ten. Go dig through every sci-fi title we've scored and see where your own favorites land, or if you'd rather find out what you actually remember about this genre instead of what you think you remember, there's a movie quiz built to correct you.