The best sci-fi and fantasy movies to watch on Netflix right now

starts promisingly enough, in an extended sequence where Sandra Bullock and Sarah Paulson, cleverly cast as sisters, volley barbed dialogue back and forth on the way to an OB-GYN appointment for the former’s heavily pregnant character, Malorie. Then the mysterious environmental disaster that’s been hovering in the background is suddenly, alarmingly foregrounded, and their drive home becomes a life-or-death obstacle course as random motorists and pedestrians start committing suicide en masse all around them. Apparently, the disaster is being caused by an unnamed, unknowable thing that makes (some) human beings immediately go insane and take their own lives upon seeing it—but not before their eyes (sometimes) turn a spooky shade of CGI purple. []

An inspired spoof of and tribute to Star Trek, stars Tim Allen as the one-time star of the long-canceled, cultishly adored science-fiction show of the title, the captain of a fictional starship whose crew now finds its steadiest employment signing autographs at conventions and opening discount electronics stores. When guileless space aliens who believe the series’ episodes to be “historical documents” (imagine hardened Trekkies, but with an even looser grasp on reality) kidnap Allen and his crew, the group is forced to recall the lessons of its fictional past and band together to save the aliens’ fragile civilization, which is founded on the high-minded if occasionally illogical principles of the series. Director Dean Parisot (Home Fries) makes the most of Robert Gordon and David Howard’s Three Amigos-in-space screenplay, never letting the impressive special effects get in the way of a solid comedy that would have worked at half the budget. But the cast is what makes Galaxy Quest work. Allen suggests the two-dimensional actor who starred on Home Improvement more than the two-dimensional actor who played Captain Kirk, but the rest turn in deft comic performances. These include Sigourney Weaver as the series’ token woman, Daryl Mitchell as its aging wunderkind navigator, Sam Rockwell as a minor player (who died in episode 82) swept along for the ride, and the especially good Alan Rickman and Tony Shalhoub, respectively playing a sardonic British actor tired of being typecast in his Spock-like role and the ship’s sleepy-eyed tech sergeant. It’s a funny, fitting homage to Star Trek and its followers that’s more entertaining than its inspiration has been in some time. []

’s familiar premise—death-row inmate must participate in dangerous games to earn his freedom, to the delight of the bloodthirsty public, who watch on pay-per-view—gets twisted nicely by technology: Every move that inmate/hero Gerard Butler makes through the urban war zones of “the game,” called Slayers, is controlled by a spoiled 17-year-old sitting in a visually overwhelming Internet playroom. If Butler and his gamer can win just a few more battles, he’ll go home to his wife and daughter. []

What a difference a director makes. In Robert Zemeckis’ recent , it felt like a downright creepy and unnecessary addition to give Geppetto a dead son as motivation for creating a wooden replica in his place. When (in select theaters now and on Netflix December 9) does the same, however, with a drunken Geppetto carving a grotesquely half-assed surrogate son replica he pledges to finish when he’s sober, only to have it come to life first … that feels appropriate. The director, known for his love of the grotesque, put his name in the title for a reason. Obviously, he wanted to distinguish it from the Disney films, but the full title also makes clear that this is distinctly his version of the classic. Carlo Collodi’s serialized story for kids may have inspired it, but del Toro isn’t going for fealty. He very much has a take, and if he creeps you out with it, so much the better.Most of the broad strokes are still here. Pinocchio (Gregory Mann) does indeed have a cricket (Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian) imparting moral lessons, this time from literally inside the wooden boy’s chest, where the bug has nested. As always, Pinocchio finds the temptations of a traveling puppet show more intriguing than school, and eventually he will be swallowed by a sea creature. But all this also happens during the rise of Mussolini in Italy, with the local fascist authority figure the Podesta (Ron Perlman, who else?) taking interest in Pinocchio both as a potential troublemaker and as a possible military recruit. This time, Geppetto, carney Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz), and the Podesta are all aware of each other’s conflicting intentions towards the string-free marionette; it’s up to Pinocchio to make actual, informed moral choices, rather than being duped into the wrong ones, as most tellings have it. []

Squaring the beautifully engineered puzzles of Memento and The Prestige with the chaos and anarchy brought by the Joker in The Dark Knight, takes place largely in a dreamscape where thieves of the mind fend off attacks from rebellious agents that clutter the subconscious. It’s a metaphysical heist picture, staged in worlds on top of worlds like nothing since Synecdoche, New York, and executed with a minimum of hand-holding.Without so much as a title to orient the audience, Nolan dives into the multiple realities of Leonardo DiCaprio, a master thief who’s made a business out of extracting secrets from people’s minds while they’re in a vulnerable dream state. His latest assignment offers a much greater challenge than usual: Instead of retrieving information, DiCaprio and his team are asked to plant an idea in someone’s head, which involves fooling the brain into believing it generated and nurtured the idea itself. (Hence the title.) In order to pull it off, DiCaprio recruits [Elliot] Page, an architect of sorts who can build dreamscapes densely layered enough for DiCaprio, his partner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a forger (Tom Hardy), and other co-conspirators to commit the ultimate in corporate sabotage. However, the ghosts in DiCaprio’s own subconscious wreak havoc on the operation. []

Peter Jackson made a lot of smart choices in making his new version of , but not trying to outdo the original might be his smartest choice of all. Sure, Kong, co-written by Jackson with Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, is longer, louder, and more action-packed than its predecessor, and filled with effects unimaginable in the ‘30s. But it’s also fundamentally the same double-edged tragedy of humans and apes wanting what can never be theirs. (Also, scenes of apes fighting dinosaurs continue to play an important part.)Retaining the original film’s art deco-and-Great Depression setting, Jackson’s King Kong opens on a world of big dreams and dire straits. Struggling actress Naomi Watts gives her all to vaudeville audiences who can barely be bothered to look up from their newspapers, while across town, producer Jack Black struggles to keep a jungle-adventure film afloat. In sudden need of a leading lady, Black ropes Watts into a scheme to run off with some studio resources and film on an uncharted South Pacific island. (Nothing beats a good location, after all.) After half-kidnapping playwright Adrien Brody, they set sail for the not-so-welcoming-sounding Skull Island.What happens next will be familiar to anyone who’s seen the original (or even the all-but-forgotten 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake), but Jackson finds ways to make every moment feel new. After a start heavy on exposition, the film strings one action setpiece after another, each realized with the breathless excitement of an adventure pulp cover. It’s as if Jackson set out to bring to life every fantasy of the last moment before earth gave way to space as the site of the final frontier. []

The family melodrama alternately conforms to expectations and defies them, which is probably why it’s already proved divisive during its run on the fall festival circuit. Some have called the film unsophisticated, saying that it makes well-meaning but obvious observations about how grief affects the young. Others connect with it on such a deep level that they can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be moved. In a way, the confusion over what this movie is meant to be—and who’ll want to watch it—befits a story that’s so tough to take at times, about an imaginative child coping with the unimaginable.In a literal sense, the “monster” in A Monster Calls is an enormous fire-breathing tree-beast, with the voice of Liam Neeson, who comes at night to haunt a preteen boy named Conor O’Malley (played by Lewis MacDougall). Five minutes into the film, though, as Conor’s shuffling pills around and listening to coughing fits from his mother, Lizzie (Felicity Jones), the title’s meaning quickly changes, as The Monster clearly comes to represent something else. And it’s nothing quite as obvious as “the real monster is cancer” either. There’s a bit more to what A Monster Calls is saying about how the process of dying transforms the living. []

never wastes a joke-telling opportunity. The opening credits are a rolling snowball of jokes. The songs by Python associate (and future Rutle) Neil Innes are whirligigs of funny rhymes and piercing insults. “Camelot Song” is matched to slapstick choreography—and one key cutaway—mounted in the difficultly lit interior of a castle that had to serve as multiple castles due to uncooperative Scottish officials. As part of the independent spirit of the enterprise, Jones and Gilliam stepped up to direct, essentially learning on the job while sharing a vision that sets the postmodern absurdity of Arthur and his knights against a backdrop of moody fantasy and barbaric history. Like the best Python products, Holy Grail speaks in a single voice, but the Terrys’ individual directorial signatures remain evident: Jones’ focus on performance (the Pythons are all in peak form here) and coverage with an eye toward putting the funniest version together in the edit; Gilliam’s animation-bred control-freak tendencies colliding with his flair for visual clutter and chaos. []

Director and co-screenwriter David N. Twohy’s concerns a grimy cargo-bearing spaceship that crash-lands on a desert planet where night never comes, inhabited solely by nefarious, carnivorous beasts that live in darkness and are terrified of light. The motley crew surviving the crash—including a tough captain (Radha Mitchell) and a menacing mass murderer with excellent night vision (Vin Diesel)—figure themselves in no immediate danger before an eclipse dramatically changes the situation. On the surface, little seems to differentiate Pitch Black from any number of films featuring grimy folks battling beasties in an enclosed space. But Pitch Black features reasonably complex, vividly drawn characters, showy special effects, and assured direction: Twohy does a good job keeping things focused on human drama rather than cheap shocks. []

The first 30 minutes of find Twohy’s antihero—played, as always, by Vin Diesel—dragging himself across a desolate digital matte landscape, sleeping in caves and beating back scavengers with shards of animal bone. Aside from a flashback and some typically noir-ish narration, this opening stretch of the film is wordless; visually and tonally, it brings to mind Paul W.S. Anderson’s underrated Kurt Russell space Western Soldier.Left for dead on a hostile planet, Diesel reverts to a nocturnal animal. After months of hunting, he comes across an abandoned mercenary outpost and activates its distress beacon, setting a trap with himself as the bait. At exactly the 30-minute mark, Twohy, a reliably surefooted storyteller, executes a complete change in perspective. As rival space crews—lead by Jordi Mollà and Matt Nable—arrive, Diesel turns from protagonist to bump-in-the-night monster, remaining largely offscreen for the middle third of the film. His presence is felt through gruesome traps and menacing graffiti on the outpost walls. At one point, a bounty hunter’s flashlight catches him dragging a mangled body back to his lair like fresh prey. []

is brisk and unpretentious, though the fact that these two qualities can be considered remarkable probably says more about the state of modern genre filmmaking than it does about the movie itself. Directed by the reliably competent Sergei Bodrov (, Mongol: The Rise Of Genghis Khan) and set in a prefab medieval world of millwheels and CGI fire, the long-shelved fantasy flick stars Jeff Bridges as Master Gregory, a gruff witch-hunter trying to take down a stylish witch queen (Julianne Moore) and her band of shape-shifting sorcerers with the help of his bland apprentice, Tom (Ben Barnes). []

Horror thrives in isolation. In the case of the new science-fiction thriller , that principle applies heavily to the Antarctic setting, where inclement weather cuts off a tiny science station from potential rescuers, darkness and bitter cold make even closely huddled buildings seem forbiddingly far apart, and circumstances set everyone in the area against each other. But the same principle also applies to the film as an artifact. It would work much better if it could be isolated from its predecessors: John W. Campbell, Jr.’s 1938 novella “Who Goes There?”, the 1951 film adaptation The Thing From Another World, and ’s classic 1982 remake . Though Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s 2011 version of The Thing keeps the name of Carpenter’s movie, it’s intended as a prequel, and feels like a stealth remake. The finale is preordained, as the film moves toward an ending that sets up Carpenter’s beginning, but the story beats along the way are just as familiar. []