If You Liked Interstellar, Watch These Next

Twelve alien spacecraft appear simultaneously around the world, and a linguist is recruited to make contact. What Villeneuve's film is actually about — and the reveal, when it comes, is one of cinema's great gut-punches — is time and grief and the question of whether knowing how something ends changes whether you would choose it. Amy Adams gives a performance of extraordinary control. The screenplay by Eric Heisserer, adapted from Ted Chiang's story "Story of Your Life," is as good as any science fiction script ever written.

A thief who steals secrets through dream infiltration is offered the chance to have his criminal record erased in exchange for planting an idea in a target's mind — a task that requires going deeper into the subconscious than anyone has gone before. Nolan's puzzle-box blockbuster is also, underneath the architecture, a film about a man who cannot stop dreaming about his dead wife and cannot go home to his children. The ending is still being argued about. That's the point.

A programmer is invited to spend a week at his reclusive CEO's remote estate to administer the Turing test to an AI named Ava. Garland's directorial debut is a precise, claustrophobic thriller about consciousness, manipulation, and what we project onto things we create. It asks whether intelligence implies personhood, and whether it matters — and it doesn't answer either question cleanly. Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander give two of the decade's best performances in a film that keeps revealing new layers the more you think about it.

Two young girls disappear on Thanksgiving Day, and one of their fathers — played by Hugh Jackman at the peak of his powers — decides the police aren't moving fast enough and takes matters into his own hands. Villeneuve's film is a thriller about fatherhood and moral certainty and the things a person believes they are capable of until they find out. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the detective investigating the case. The film doesn't let either of them off the hook, and it doesn't let the audience off either.

Tim Lake discovers on his 21st birthday that the men in his family can travel back in time. He uses this gift mostly to improve his love life — and then, gradually, to be a better son to his father. Richard Curtis made this as his last film and it shows: it's warmer and less tidily constructed than his earlier work, more willing to sit in sadness. The time travel is a device. The film is about fathers and sons and the ordinary days that, looking back, turn out to have been the important ones.

A monolith appears at the dawn of human consciousness. Millions of years later, astronauts travel to Jupiter, accompanied by an AI called HAL 9000 who begins to malfunction. Kubrick's film is the one that Interstellar is in conversation with — the film that established what serious science fiction cinema could do and what it could ask. It is slow, demanding, and periodically sublime. The final twenty minutes remain the most ambitious sequence in the history of the medium. Nothing has fully caught up with it.

Thirty years after the original, a new blade runner uncovers a secret that could destabilise what remains of civilisation — and sets out to find Rick Deckard, who has been hiding for decades. Villeneuve's sequel is longer and slower and more interior than Ridley Scott's original, and more ambitious: a film about what it means to be real, to have memories, to matter. Roger Deakins shot it, and it is the most beautiful film of the last decade. Give it the time it asks for.

Sam Bell is three years into a solo contract mining helium-3 on the lunar surface when something goes wrong. Duncan Jones made this film for $5 million with one actor — Sam Rockwell, doing the best work of his career — and created one of the most intimate science fiction films ever made. It's about identity and loneliness and what a corporation owes the people who work for it. The twist comes early and the film doesn't coast on it. What it becomes after the reveal is better than what it was before.