The Best Sci-Fi Movies of 2025 — Ranked and Worth Revisiting
Last year delivered one of the strongest runs of science fiction cinema in a decade. If you missed any of these in theatres, here is the definitive ranking — with honest verdicts on what is worth your time.
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2025 was quietly one of the best years for science fiction in a long time
Nobody really planned it that way. Studios don't coordinate release schedules to produce genre waves. But 2025 ended up delivering a run of science fiction films that ranged from genuinely great to usefully instructive about what the genre can and cannot do.
I've been watching sci-fi closely for about fifteen years. Last year was the first time in a while I felt genuinely surprised by what the genre was doing — not just "good for a blockbuster" surprised, but actually moved by ideas surprised.
Here's my honest ranking of the best the year had to offer, with enough context to decide whether each film is worth your time now that they're all streaming.
1. Project Hail Mary
Directed by: Phil Lord and Christopher Miller | Stars: Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller | Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
I'll say it plainly: this is the best science fiction film since Interstellar (2014), and I think it's better than Interstellar in the ways that matter.
Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a junior high school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there or what he's supposed to do. The first thirty minutes of the film, as he pieces together his situation through experiment and observation, is as good as Hollywood science fiction has ever been. Grace doesn't have a montage moment. He has a methodology. The film trusts you to follow him through it.
The friendship at the heart of the story — between Grace and an alien engineer named Rocky, who communicates initially through musical tones — is unlike anything I've seen in a film about first contact. It earns its emotion by being scientifically honest about how two radically different intelligences would actually have to work to understand each other.
The final act is the only place the film compromises, and even then it compromises toward feeling rather than spectacle. I cried. I don't cry at films very often.
Who it's for: Anyone who liked The Martian or Arrival but wanted more scientific rigour and emotional depth. Also everyone else.
2. Warfare
Directed by: Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza | Stars: D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn | Where to watch: A24 streaming
Warfare isn't science fiction in the traditional sense. It's a war film — a reconstruction of a specific operation in Mosul in 2006, directed by Alex Garland alongside Ray Mendoza, a Navy SEAL who was there.
I've included it here because of how it approaches its subject. The film has no score, no conventional narrative arc, no explanation of why things happen or who anyone is before the mission begins. It drops you into the middle of something real and leaves you there for 95 minutes.
The effect is closer to speculative experience than most films marketed as science fiction. It defamiliarises violence in a way that science fiction has always aspired to — by making you inhabit it without the comfortable distance of genre.
It holds a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and deserves it. I found it genuinely difficult to watch and genuinely important.
Who it's for: People who found Zero Dark Thirty too conventional and can handle something that refuses to make war legible.
3. Mickey 17
Directed by: Bong Joon-ho | Stars: Robert Pattinson, Naomi Ackie, Steven Yeun | Where to watch: Max
Bong Joon-ho's follow-up to Parasite is a satirical science fiction film about an "expendable" — a person hired to die repeatedly on a deep-space colony mission, printed fresh each time from a stored template. Robert Pattinson plays Mickey 17 (and, when a printing error creates a duplicate, Mickey 18) with the specific kind of anxious, self-aware intelligence he's been developing since Good Time (2017).
The satire is less subtle than Parasite. The allegory about expendable workers and exploitative systems is visible from orbit. But Pattinson does something genuinely difficult with it: he makes Mickey sympathetic without ever letting him be heroic, and he makes you laugh at a character you're simultaneously worried about.
The film stumbles in its final act. It doesn't fully earn the emotional turn it reaches for. But the first two thirds are inventive and funny and occasionally quite dark, and Pattinson makes it worth the full runtime.
Who it's for: Fans of Parasite who are curious where Bong Joon-ho goes in English-language science fiction. Manage expectations on the ending.
4. Opus
Directed by: Mark Anthony Green | Stars: John Malkovich, Ayo Edebiri | Where to watch: Available digitally
A near-future cult thriller that uses science fiction infrastructure to deliver psychological horror. John Malkovich plays a legendary reclusive musician who re-emerges after thirty years, inviting a small group of journalists to his compound in the Nevada desert.
Ayo Edebiri is the young music critic who goes and gradually realises something is wrong with the situation — and with herself, for how much she wanted to be there.
The film's first two acts are quietly excellent. It builds a specific, uncomfortable atmosphere around celebrity worship and the way ambition makes you overlook warning signs. Malkovich plays his character with controlled menace, never overdoing it.
The ending divided critics, and I understand why. It makes a choice that not everyone will accept. But I think it's the right choice, and the film earns it through everything that comes before.
Who it's for: Fans of slow-burn psychological thriller who are interested in what happens when admiration curdles.
5. The Electric State
Directed by: Joe and Anthony Russo | Stars: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Ke Huy Quan | Where to watch: Netflix
I'm including this one as a cautionary entry, not a recommendation.
Simon Stålenhag's illustrated novel The Electric State is one of the most visually and thematically rich works of science fiction produced in the last decade. It depicts a near-future America of drone warfare, neural interface addiction, and a war that ended quietly and left everyone somehow more lost than before.
The Russo brothers' adaptation is aesthetically faithful and dramatically empty. The production design is extraordinary. The script asks nothing of its premise. Every interesting idea in the source material gets translated into a set piece and then forgotten.
Watch it if you want to see Stålenhag's world rendered in live action. Do not expect it to say anything about that world.
The lesson: production budget and source material are not sufficient conditions for good science fiction. Ideas require execution.
What to watch next
If Project Hail Mary left you wanting more: Andy Weir's novel is the source, and the book is deeper and stranger than the film in the best possible way. His other novels, The Martian and Artemis, are also excellent — The Martian is more accessible, Artemis is more ambitious.
If Mickey 17 left you wanting more Bong Joon-ho: Parasite first, then Memories of Murder (2003), then Snowpiercer (2013). In that order.
If Warfare left you wanting more Alex Garland: 28 Days Later (he wrote it), Ex Machina (wrote and directed), Annihilation (wrote and directed). All three are genuinely excellent.
The best science fiction asks you to think about something real through an unfamiliar frame. All five films on this list do that, to varying degrees of success. The fact that one of them does it about as well as anything the genre has produced in twenty years is worth celebrating.