The 10 best sci-fi movies on Amazon Prime Video

Asteroid City (2023)

Wes Anderson doubles down on style, artifice, and metatextual layers with this entertaining (yet profound) confection. The film simultaneously tracks a play about a group of young stargazers and their parents who converge for a convention in the desert town of Asteroid City, as well as the writing of that play by a famed playwright. Within the reality of the play, a UFO descends upon the junior stargazers, causing fascination (and panic) within the community. While science fiction is more of a side dish than the whole meal here, Anderson's thematic ambitions with Asteroid City also relate quite well to storytelling within the genre. As EW's critic writes of Anderson's thesis, "To find the truth in art, you have to give yourself over to the artifice of the dream." —Kevin Jacobsen

Where to watch Asteroid City: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: B (read the review)

Director: Wes Anderson

Cast: Jason Schwartzman, Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Jeffrey Wright, Tilda Swinton, Bryan Cranston, Edward Norton, Adrien Brody, Liev Schreiber

Related content: Here's what you need to know about Asteroid City, courtesy of Wes Anderson

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Sure, it may have been slightly overshadowed by a certain other sci-fi film released in 1977. Yet, Close Encounters of the Third Kind has rightfully lasted as a thoughtful examination of human curiosity concerning the great unknown of space, directed by one of our most humanistic directors, Steven Spielberg. The film follows electrician Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) as he experiences an encounter with a UFO. He and a single mother named Jillian (Melinda Dillon), who also had a close encounter, experience mysterious visions, while scientists investigate a series of strange phenomena that may be related. —K.J.

Where to watch Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Steven Spielberg

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss, Teri Garr, Melinda Dillon, François Truffaut

Related content: Close Encounters at 40: Spielberg still believes 'we're not alone in the universe'

Coherence (2013)

When old friends reunite for a dinner party in a movie, you know something is about to go terribly awry. In Coherence, that "something" is the arrival of a close-passing comet — and the discovery of a house full of doppelgängers having an identical dinner party down the street. The plot is full of quantum-related twists and turns, but the film is grounded by the talented cast, which includes Buffy's Nicholas Brendon in a fun self-referential role as a former TV star. The production is just as quirky as the premise: Director James Ward Byrkit wanted to make a low-budget film that was so stripped down, it didn't even have a script. Instead, he invited a bunch of actor friends to his living room, gave them basic character motivations, and let them improvise through the entire thing. The result, while occasionally messy, is thoroughly original. —Janey Tracey

Where to watch Coherence: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: B+ (read the review)

Director: James Ward Byrkit

Cast: Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Lorene Scafaria

Related content: Things get spooky in clip from new sci-fi film Coherence

The Dead Zone (1983)

What exactly would you do if you suddenly had the power of psychic visions? In this Stephen King adaptation, schoolteacher Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) must face such deliberation when he awakens from a coma with the ability to know a person's past and future just by touching them. After foreseeing such harrowing events as a kid drowning and a man who would become president ordering a nuclear strike on the USSR, Johnny comes to realize that he may also have the power to alter the future. The Dead Zone presents a world not unlike our own, where every action has consequences, in a gripping film enhanced by its sci-fi premise rather than being weighed down by it. —K.J. 

Where to watch The Dead Zone: Amazon Prime Video

Director: David Cronenberg

Cast: Christopher Walken, Brooke Adams, Tom Skerritt, Herbert Lom, Anthony Zerbe, Colleen Dewhurst, Martin Sheen

Related content: The 10 essential David Cronenberg films

The Host (2006)

Six years after South Korea's Han River is contaminated with a dangerous concentration of formaldehyde, an amphibious monster emerges from the deep to terrorize the local inhabitants. The creature kidnaps a snack bar vendor's (Song Kang-ho) daughter, leading him and his family to set out and find her. Written and directed by Bong Joon Ho, who earned worldwide acclaim for his Oscar-winning film Parasite (2019), The Host proved his abilities as a social commentator 13 years earlier. As EW's critic writes, "When the filmmaker isn’t eliciting honest empathy, he is sneaking in lively, absurdist commentary about SARS, mass hysteria, health-care bureaucracy, consumerism, and American-Korean relations." —K.J.

Where to watch The Host: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: N/A (read the review)

Director: Bong Joon Ho

Cast: Song Kang-ho, Byun Hee-bong, Park Hae-il, Doona Bae, Go Ah-sung

Related content: The 25 best Korean horror movies of all time, ranked

I Think We're Alone Now (2018)

In this low-budget indie drama, Peter Dinklage stars as a man who assumes he's alone in his small town after a sudden apocalyptic event in which a large portion of the population suddenly disappears. He eventually meets a fellow survivor (Elle Fanning), with whom he shares a reluctant bond, and later learns that they're not, in fact, alone. Directed and shot by Reed Morano (an Emmy winner for directing the pilot of The Handmaid's Tale), I Think We're Alone Now focuses on the human response to cataclysmic events more so than the event itself. "I like the postapocalyptic genre, but it's been done a million times, and I was looking for something a little bit weird, or just a little bit different tonally," Morano told EW in 2018. "I saw this opportunity to tell a postapocalyptic story that breaks a lot of the conventions of storytelling in that genre." —K.J.

Where to watch I Think We're Alone Now: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Reed Morano

Cast: Peter Dinklage, Elle Fanning, Paul Giamatti, Charlotte Gainsbourg

Related content: Reed Morano first woman to win for directing a drama at Emmys in 22 years

Interstellar (2014)

After turning a film as cerebral as Inception into an Oscar-winning hit, Christopher Nolan indulged in his sci-fi-loving sensibilities even further with this space epic. Matthew McConaughey delivers one of his most achingly sincere performances as Cooper, a NASA pilot living on a ravaged Earth who embarks on a last-hope mission to an exoplanet that may be capable of sustaining life. What he finds on his trip becomes a mind-bending (and time-bending) testament to humanity's fight for survival, its sense of resilience, and its profound effect on future generations. While the film refuses to hold your hand in exploring such heady themes, those who give themselves over to Nolan's vision will be bowled over by its advanced storytelling on such a grand scale. —K.J.

Where to watch Interstellar: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Christopher Nolan

Cast: Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Jessica Chastain, Bill Irwin, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Caine

Related content: The science of Interstellar: A primer on black holes, wormholes, and more

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978)

In this sci-fi classic, an extraterrestrial race is populating Earth with pods that systematically replace humans with alien duplicates. The film follows a quartet of friends who try to uncover the truth and alert the authorities before it's too late, eventually waging war against pod people. Featuring one of the most chilling endings of all time, Invasion of the Body Snatchers remains a tense thrill ride and a powerful commentary on paranoia. This was the second of multiple adaptations of Jack Finney's 1955 novel The Body Snatchers, and, as EW's critic writes of the 1978 film, "this version is the most slitheringly creepy." —K.J.

Where to watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Amazon Prime Video

EW grade: A (read the review)

Director: Philip Kaufman

Cast: Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright

Related content: Six movie remakes that are worth watching

The Vast of Night (2020)

This underrated sci-fi indie centers on a pair of teenage friends living in 1950s New Mexico who investigate a cryptic audio signal that suddenly interrupts a radio program. Putting the pieces together, they unravel a conspiracy that may suggest proof of alien life. With a budget of just $700,000, director Andrew Patterson pulls off a number of stunning shots, transporting us to a specific time and place. As EW wrote following the film's success, "Just the setting and veneer of the film — it's framed as an episode of a Twilight Zone-esque anthology TV series — should be enough for you to guess more or less where it's headed." —K.J.

Where to watch The Vast of Night: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Andrew Patterson

Cast: Sierra McCormick, Jake Horowitz

Related content: How The Vast of Night pulled off its stunning tracking shot

The War of the Worlds (1953)

H.G. Wells' 1898 novel The War of the Worlds was one of the first-ever alien invasion tales, and Orson Welles' 1938 CBS radio adaptation famously caused a panic when listeners believed a Martian attack was actually taking place. But when it comes to films based on Wells' work, the 1953 version still reigns supreme. The story, which follows an atomic scientist instead of a 19th-century writer, is updated to tap into Cold War anxieties, but in the end, just as in the novel, the invasion is presented as a natural disaster largely outside of human control. Although the special effects are no longer as groundbreaking as they were in the '50s, they're still incredibly entertaining, especially the manta ray-shaped alien war machines. —J.T.

Where to watch The War of the Worlds: Amazon Prime Video

Director: Byron Haskin

Cast: Gene Barry, Ann Robinson

Related content: Listen to Orson Welles' The War of the Worlds radio broadcast