The Best Science Fiction Film From Every Year

Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon, from 1902, is one of the earliest films ever made and is classified as an adventure short that runs a brief 14 minutes, standard for the period. But just as importantly, it's also one of the first science fiction movies in a genre that has gripped audiences for more than a century.

Even though other early-cinema odysseys could be classified as science fiction, it wasn't until Fritz Lang's 1927 epic Metropolis — the first feature film to take place in the future — that the genre showed its first ripples of seriousness. And that's where the list below of the Best Science Fiction Film From Every Year begins.

As typified by A Trip to the Moon, science fiction films are rarely exclusive to their genre. Action, adventure, comedy and science fiction's closest bedfellow, horror, often creeps into stories. The one thing that sets them apart is that their core storytelling centers, for the most part, on science.

READ MORE: The Best Horror Film From Every Year

The late '70s and '80s were a particularly fertile period for science fiction films, thanks mostly to the overwhelming success of Star Wars in 1977. Conversely, there are some lesser years when, for lack of better choices, the films in the list are there by default rather than on merit. Much of the '40s, for instance, was especially barren for science fiction films, let alone great ones.

Likewise, several years were overcrowded with excellent films, which is why undisputed classics like Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Stalker, E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, The Thing, Back to the Future and The Fly were regrettably left off the list in favor of slightly better and more influential science fiction films. In the end, think of the Best Science Fiction Film From Every Year as a starter list to explore the multilayered universes of one of cinema's most versatile and durable genres.