2014's Best Sci-Fi Movies

Ticket sales at the box office may have been at a 20-year low in 2014, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t anything worth seeing. I’m a firm believer that, no matter the state of the industry, there will always be people making exciting, interesting films, you just might have to look for them. Regardless of what this means for studios and their bottom lines, sci-fi fans had a lot to dig into over the past year. There were huge, spectacle style blockbusters right along side quiet, introspective independent features more concerned with ideas than eye candy, as well as everything in between. There are a few gaps in my genre viewing for the year—I still have yet to watch titles like Young Ones, The Zero Theorem, and Under the Skin for some reason—but in this spirit, here are my top ten (actually eleven) sci-fi movies of 2014.

'Lucy' Movie Review

Abandon all logic ye who enter here, because we are about to start talking Lucy. You might want to leave reason and science by the door while you're at it, you won’t have much call to use either of those for the next 90 minutes or so. French action auteur Luc Besson has made his version of 2001, or at least his Tree of Life, and it is a wild, wild time. People are going to walk into what they think is a Scarlett Johansson-fronted action movie and have their minds broken. This is very much not the movie you were led to expect, but goddamn if it isn’t a total freaking blast. There will be those who laud this as the most fun movie of the summer, while others will condemn it as complete and utter nonsense, and somehow they’ll both be right.