Essential Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films in the Criterion Collection

Godzilla—The Showa-Era Films
This colossal box set includes every Godzilla film made between 1954 and 1975. Oh, you need more? Up until now, the Godzilla films have been available only in a hodge-podge of formats—if at all—which is why it was such a kaiju-sized surprise when Criterion announced this collection of 15 (!) films starring the big green guy (and that’s not even counting several alternate versions of some of them). This formative period in Godzilla history sees the focus of the series go from thoughtful social commentary, to outer-space science fiction, to monster rally and back again, with the serious, scary, and silly sides of Godzilla all well-represented. Naturally there are plenty of extras on offer for each film, as well as a gorgeous hardcover book featuring glorious new illustrations for each movie created by popular artists. There has never been a better way to experience Godzilla’s reign of destruction—nor a better way for Criterion to celebrate its 1,000th release.

Godzilla
If you aren’t a monster Godzilla fan, you can also opt for just the classic original film, available in a truly great standalone edition. The ultimate kaiju movie also happens to be a brilliant bit of filmmaking and a very pointed take on the perils of the nuclear age from a country with good reason to fear the bomb. The plot is familiar: radioactive beast terrorizes Tokyo, but this first outing is also deeply human. The Criterion edition includes the original Japanese version, as well as the American cut with Raymond Burr.

Nineteen Eighty-Four
This addition to the Criterion Collection is a film with remarkable currency in our own time—said everyone since the original George Orwell novel was published shortly after the end of World War II. This visually striking and emotionally harrowing British production, directed by Michael Radford (Il Postino) came out in the year of the novel’s title and setting but is no mere opportunistic cash-in, bringing the stark oppression of the classic text to vivid life. In a time of endless surveillance and constant war, John Hurt stars as a disaffected citizen who risks everything for a relationship with a rebel, defying culturally mandated conformity in the name of freedom and individuality. The new 4K restoration presents the cinematography of Academy Award-winner Roger Deakins in its best light, and the bonus features include a choice of alternate scores—one in the classical mold from Radford’s preferred composer Dominic Muldowney; the other a studio-mandated ’80s pop take from the Eurythmics.

The Blob
By right, The Blob should be a silly and forgettable bit of ’50s sci-fi schlock. But the film’s pedigree has made it a classic: this is the movie that introduced the world to Steve McQueen, and it opens with a catchy Burt Bacharach-written song that makes clear that it’s all in good fun. The story of an alien amoeba crashing down in small-town Pennsylvania, with teenager McQueen in hot pursuit, has become an absolute cult classic.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars
Crusoe works on two levels, and they’re somewhat contradictory: on one level, it’s a lush and gorgeous technicolor fantasy about a man and his pet monkey lost on Mars featuring some truly imaginative special effects from master Byron Haskin. On another, it’s surprisingly realistic, taking its lead character’s plight seriously and offering up a vision of Mars that’s maybe not scientifically accurate, but well considered and plausible, at least circa 1964.

La Jetée
The experimental film covers a lot of science fiction ground in its short running time, some of which will be familiar if you’ve seen the movie or TV versions of 12 Monkeys, which are quite loosely based on this film. A prisoner in post-WWIII Paris becomes the subject of a plan to send people into the past and future to bring back help for the apocalyptic present. The prisoner visits a memory of his own childhood before seeing the far future in the twisty-turny story. The Criterion edition comes with Marker’s follow-up travelogue, Sans Soleil.

Things to Come
Inexplicably forgotten, Things to Come isn’t just a triumph of design, it also boasts one of the most impressive screenwriting credits in science fiction film history: H. G. Wells himself wrote the screenplay and collaborated on other aspects of the movie. Tracing the path of human history from 1940 (the film came out in 1936) through to 2036, it’s surprisingly prescient about some of the challenges (world war and dictatorship among them) to be faced by humanity in the century to come. The megabudget production was one of the very first serious sci-fi films.

Fantastic Planet
That René Laloux’s weird sci-fi allegory is now widely available in high-def is one of the wonders of our age. The French and Czechoslovakian film tells of the Draags, giant blue aliens who have brought Earthlings to their world to be treated as pets, zoo exhibits, and, sometimes, wild animals to be hunted. The dynamic is all about racism and imperialism, but this stop-motion animated film is also trippy, psychedelic, and weird in ways that stick with you long after the social messages have faded.

Repo Man
Grizzled repo man Harry Dean Stanton takes young and rowdy Emilio Estevez under his wing in this supremely weird, very funny cult film. The two wind up on the hunt for a 1964 Chevy Malibu with aliens in the trunk. The punk soundtrack is killer, and the movie’s take on Reagan-era America is biting. It’s one of the quintessential punk films, and there’s been no other movie like it before or since.

Scanners
If its not already clear, any Criterion reputation for fussiness should be dispelled by Scanners, a movie with much to recommend it, but that’s most famously about people blowing up other people’s heads with their brains. Of course, this was the breakout film of legendary director David Cronenberg, combining shocking and gruesome special effects with deeper ideas about corporate hegemony and the uncharted limits of the human mind. A renegade “scanner” with powerful telepathic and psychokinetic abilities wages war on the company trying to control his kind and, yes, he does so by blowing up heads.

Videodrome
Also from David Cronenberg, this surreal film has all of the director’s trademarks: there’s transgressive violence, grotesque body horror, and sadomasochistic sex. The CEO of a small Toronto television station goes on the hunt for for new material, only to stumble upon the pirate broadcast of a hyper-violent torture show. Digging deeper, he quickly finds himself on a journey deep into a shadowy and hallucinogenic world of right-wing conspiracies, losing touch with his own reality.

Pan’s Labyrinth 
Guillermo del Toro is another director with more than one film in the collection—and all three of them are even arguably fantasy films, but though we love Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, it’s hard to beat this 2006 awards favorite. On one level, it’s a tense drama set in 1944 in post-civil war Spain in which a young girl and her mother travel to meet the girl’s new step-father, a despotic Captain of the Francoist regime who hunts down the surviving rebels who opposed Franco in the war. While her pregnant mother’s health worsens, Ofelia falls into a vivid, dangerous fantasy real loaded with parables, prophecies, and bizarre creatures (whose grotesque but gorgeous designs earned the film a Best Makeup Oscar). A tense and terrifying mix of wartime melodrama and darkly capital-r Romantic fairy tale.

Seconds
From John Frankenheimer, Seconds follows a middle-aged banker who elects to undergo a revolutionary procedure that will give him a new life: specifically, a new body that looks an awful lot like Rock Hudson in his prime. Adjusting to his new life isn’t as easy as he expects, and, of course, he learns that the miracle procedure hasn’t come without a cost. Like many of Frankenheimer’s films, this is one that’s only grown in stature over the decades.

Brazil
Terry Gilliam’s legendary dystopian masterwork finds everyman Jonathan Pryce caught in an utterly soul-crushing bureaucracy full of barely functional machines. It’s one of the best, and most effective, anti-authoritarian works in any medium, brilliantly satirizing the dehumanizing elements of the industrial world. The Criterion edition features a restored director’s cut supervised by Gilliam himself, as well as a fascinating documentary on its behind-the-scenes struggle.

Time Bandits
Slightly less substantial than Brazil, but even more fun, Gilliam’s Time Bandits is a surreal and silly (in the best way) voyage through time and space. A boy named Kevin escapes his parents in favor of traveling with a band of time pirates conducting raids throughout history. Unfortunately, the Evil Genius played by David Warner is watching their every move. Monty Python alums Gilliam and Michael Palin teamed up on the script, and it shares the darkly funny sensibilities of that series.

Solaris
Andrei Tarkovsky’s stately film eschews science fiction tropes in favor of a deep exploration of the lives and minds of scientists in the isolated and extreme environment of a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris. A psychologist travels to the station to seek out the reasons for mysterious messages from the station, only to find himself experiencing the same phenomena that have affected the crew. It’s a haunting film that uses sci-fi to probe ideas of love and humanity. (Tarkovsky’s follow-up, Stalker, also in the collection, took his ideas even further.)

World on a Wire
This three-and-a-half hour 1973 made-for-German television miniseries, directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder—based on the science fiction novel Simulacron-3 and later remade into the American film The Thirteenth Floor—takes place in a virtual city where the artificial residents don’t realize they only exist within a computer program. It’s a philosophical head trip, with vintage ’70s style to spare. The Criterion extras include a 50-minute documentary on the production.

The Princess Bride
Another reminder that Criterion’s idea of what makes a film “important” isn’t at all snobbish, as one of the most beloved films of the modern era has just joined the collection. The silly, sweet, and very quotable fantasy adventure starts with a sick kid and the grandpa who just wants to read him a story… minus the kissing parts. He gets a lot more than he bargained for. In addition to an array of new and classic extras, this edition boasts a brand-new 4K digital restoration.