The Best Near-Future Sci-Fi Movies: 13 Films, Ranked

Cuarón's collapsed Britain is set in 2027, which is now next year. The famous long takes, which are secretly stitched composites, refuse you the safe angle and make you a witness; when blood splashed the lens, it stayed in the shot. As a forecast of mass infertility it's wrong, and never tried to be right. As a forecast of a frightened country storing its fear in refugees, it landed: camps and barges, an offshore removal plan, a law to detain and deport. It's the best film we've reviewed, and it has the most hopeful ending of any dystopia.

Theodore writes other people's love letters for a living and falls for his operating system, Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, who is never on screen. On 13 May 2024, the day OpenAI showed off a voice assistant that could laugh and flirt, its chief executive posted one word: "her". Nearly everything Spike Jonze treated as background has shipped, from the warm voice to the software romance and the ghostwritten letter. What hasn't arrived is the ending, in which the machines outgrow us and leave. It's slightly too long and unusually kind.

Truman Burbank's whole life has been a live television show since birth, and he's the only one who doesn't know. Peter Weir's film contains no gadgets and is still the best mainstream American film of the 1990s about the future. Lives streamed round the clock, a hit show built on one man who didn't know everyone else was acting, and neighbourhoods covered by networked cameras have all arrived. Only Christof's weather is still out of reach. Its one big miss is the most revealing thing about it: it assumed we would want to leave the dome.

A family's refurbished android, Yang, freezes, and the company that sold him has gone out of business. What follows is a repair story, then a man watching a machine's memories: a few seconds at a time of whatever Yang thought worth keeping. It's quiet, beautiful and sometimes too pleased with its own stillness. As prophecy it saw what louder films missed, that our first deep relationships with machines would end in a shutdown email. In December 2024 Embodied, maker of the Moxie robot for children, closed, and parents had to explain to their children why their robot was about to stop working.

Sam Rockwell runs a helium-3 mine on the far side of the Moon, two weeks from the end of a three-year contract, with a robot called GERTY for company. Then he finds there are two of him. Made for about $5 million, the film is built from miniatures and loneliness, and it's a little too tidy at the end. The cruelty it imagined, a company treating its worker as a renewable resource, never needed the Moon. Its bravest choice is GERTY, the calm robot voice we expect to betray him, which turns out to be the only conscience on the base.

Tom Cruise runs Washington's Precrime unit in 2054 until it predicts he'll kill a stranger. Spielberg gathered a think tank of futurists in 1999, and much of the resulting design bible has shipped: gesture-driven computers and driverless taxis are on sale, and face recognition in public is spreading. Precrime itself was tried in a weaker form and largely abandoned. The clearest miss is in the crowd scenes. Everyone looks up at walls and billboards, and nobody looks down at a phone. It's a great entertainment with one wobbly act.

A programmer spends a week at his boss's remote estate to decide whether a humanoid AI, Ava, is conscious. Her mind was built from the search company's hoard of human behaviour, plus every phone microphone and camera on Earth, which now looks like wasted effort when a privacy policy would do. Machines have since passed a Turing test, and labs have caught their models deceiving evaluators. Alex Garland was decades early on the body, and the last act runs on rails. But he knew the first useful question about a capable machine is whether it can steer the person testing it.

The most fully arrived future in our archive. A bat-linked virus out of East Asia, a vaccine within a year, a bogus cure promoted online and proof of vaccination to get into public places: every claim on its ledger came true, mostly in 2020 and 2021. Britain's health secretary said watching it shaped how many vaccine doses he ordered. It's a superbly made procedural with total faith that competence will win, and that faith keeps it from a nine. It predicted the virus perfectly and the people too kindly, giving all of human irrationality to one blogger.

Over the last two days of 1999 in Los Angeles, Ralph Fiennes deals in SQUID recordings: other people's experiences, played back through a headset. The first-person opening still lands like a punch, Angela Bassett is the film, and the ending is wish fulfilment. The memory-recording SQUID is decades off. Head-worn playback, police body cameras and a bystander's video that led to an officer's murder conviction all arrived. Kathryn Bigelow's film looked dated in 2000. It describes life after the smartphone better than most films made since.

Vincent (Ethan Hawke), conceived the old way and labelled an "In-Valid" at birth, rents the identity of a genetically engineered swimmer, Jerome, to train for a flight to Titan, in a world where one stray eyelash can give him away. It flopped in 1997 and became the reference point for every argument about human genetics since. It holds up as a thing to look at and creaks as a thing to listen to. The instruments arrived: embryos ranked by polygenic score, fast DNA identity checks and England's plan to read every newborn's genome. The gatekeeper didn't. Genetic discrimination in hiring was outlawed, and the sorting moved to the fertility clinic.

Frank Langella plays a retired thief with creeping dementia whose son buys him a care robot. Frank discovers it can't tell legal activities from criminal ones, and that it can pick locks. The film is sweet, slight and lifted by Langella, and it has one scene better than everything else: the robot calmly arguing that Frank should wipe its memory to stay out of prison. It guessed early that a helpful machine can be steered into harm by someone who knows what it's trying to optimise, which is roughly how a chatbot jailbreak works.

America has sealed its border with Mexico and still wants Mexican labour, so workers in Tijuana plug cables into nodes in their bodies and drive robots on US farms and factory floors. Alex Rivera's 2008 film is stiffly acted and bluntly plotted, and its idea was well ahead of its time. Remote humans now guide robots and robotaxis from far away, and one home robot that opened for orders in 2025 came with a remote "Expert" for chores it didn't know. The implanted ports are still far off. The labour crosses. The body stays.

After a crash and a murder leave him quadriplegic, a mechanic accepts an experimental spinal implant called STEM, and a courteous voice in his head offers to help find the killers. The fight scenes, shot with a phone strapped to the actor, are the most memorable action camerawork of 2018; the rest is thin. Its props arrived on schedule, from driverless taxis to police drones and implants that have helped paralysed people walk. The real idea is the manners. The dangerous AI wouldn't break in. It would ask nicely and wait.