Are there any fans of World On A String?
I tried to watch the first half of it but wasn’t pulled in. It had a cool style but I got bored.
Forgot to add Melancholia (the 2011 drama, not the 2006 horror flick) also streaming at Netflix. Not a Kirsten Dunst fan and not an artsy movie fan, but this was remarkable.
I liked Melancholia, but someone looking for science fiction might be a little disappointed. It’s pretty much two hours of “here’s a wedding party, and the bride is bipolar, and her family is dysfunctional” with a few minutes at the end of “woah, that planet is heading right for us. Well, it’s been fun.”
Pitch Black, which was much better than the sequel, The Chronicles of Riddick.
I watched Safety Not Guaranteed the other night. It was very enjoyable and could be considered sci-fi (especially the ending.)
I thought Gattaca was pretty good.
Morons from Outer Space - well title says it all.
Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones & Jimmy Nail - I thought it was great…
Basque low budget time travel flick where you can in fact follow the plot. No biggie, but watchable.
Dark City is definitely worth a watch if you’ve not seen it
Timecrimes (Los cronocrímenes) may have been filmed in the Basque region of Spain with production money from Basque-oriented agencies, but it is entirely in Spanish.
CalMeacham has mentioned it, but I really want to emphasize The Man from Earth (which however came out 5, not 15 years ago, assuming we’re talking about the same film). It’s rare to see so much done with so little!
Traumschiff Surprise – Periode 1 is a German parody of Star Trek and Star Wars, amongst other things, and is very funny.
Earth II: A technical look at life on a space station in the near future. Surprisingly good for a tv movie. Mariette Hartley was so beautiful, but so woefully ignorant of orbital mechanics.
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun: Astronauts go to a duplicate Earth that has been hidden from us the whole time because it’s always on the other side of the sun.
Americathon: Most would call this John Ritter movie a comedy, that was never really funny, but for others it’s a chilling tale of what a second term for Jimmy Carter would have looked like.
Glad to see people mention Dark Star.
Someone already mentioned Panic in Year Zero! but another Ray Milland classic, directed by Roger Corman, is X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Milland plays a scientist who invents a formula that gives him X-ray vision.
The Day the Earth Caught Fire is a good British disaster movie, directed by Val Guest.
Timescape (aka “The Grand Tour,” aka “Disaster in Time”) is a decent adaptation of Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore’s classic story “Vintage Season,” though it changes the ending. Directed by David Twohy, who later made Pitch Black.
Luc Besson’s Le Dernier Combat is a very odd, black-and-white, nearly silent post-apocalypse movie.
There was a very good adaptation of Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven on PBS in the early 1980s. Much better than the more recent version.
The End of August at the Hotel Ozone is a low-key post-apocalyptic Czech movie from the 1960s.
The Silent Star (aka “First Spaceship on Venus”) is actually an interesting East German SF movie. It was chopped badly and dubbed in English when it was released in the US, but the original movie is available on DVD.
Everyone hates [del]Chris[/del] The Red Planet Mars, but I thought it was really cool. It mixes communication with aliens, cold war fears, and religion in an interesting way.
Story by Stanislaw Lem, who also wrote Solaris.
Came in to mention this one.
I thought I was the only person who remembered this movie. It’s shame it never found that pent-up, untapped audience that was yearning to see Harvey Korman and Meat Loaf work together.
Wait a minute! I just looked it up on IMDb. Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman; Firesign Theater Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman?!
Oh yeah, I forgot about Dark City. I haven’t seen that for several years, I need to watch it again.
The Bamboo Saucer 1968
So obscure I found it only on VHS!
Alphaville, une étrange aventure de Lemmy Caution is a particularly odd film that’s worth seeing.
I watched this one on your rec, it was pretty fun.
The Illustrated Man
Caught this one about a year ago, rather strange little film. A man has tat…ok ok illustrations on his body which chronicle apparently reincarnations of the same man throughout time. It was uneven but a great creepy kinda mood, little known.