2015 marks the 120th anniversary of sf cinema. This is the eighth part of a year-by-year list of films I’d recommend (not always for the same reasons). Part one (1895-1914), part two (1915-34), part three (1935-54), part four (1955-1964), part five (1965-74), part six (1975-84), part seven (1985-94)
1995
Atolladero (Óscar Aibar)
La cité des enfants perdus/City of Lost Children (Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet)
Kôkaku Kidôtai/Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii)
1996
Rubber’s Lover (Shozin Fukui)
Space Truckers (Stuart Gordon)
1997
Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes (Alejandro Amenábar)
Conceiving Ada (Lynn Hershman-Leeson)
Cube (Vincenzo Natali)
Epsilon (Rolf de Heer)
Event Horizon (Paul WS Anderson)
Face/Off (John Woo)
Gattaca (Andrew Niccol)
Nowhere (Gregg Araki)
Smilla’s Sense of Snow (Bille August)
Starship Troopers (Paul Verhoeven)
The Sticky Fingers of Time (Hilary Brougher)
1998
Blade (Stephen Norrington)
Dark City (Alex Proyas)
Last Night (Don McKellar)
New Rose Hotel (Abel Ferrara)
Pi (Darren Aronofsky)
La Sonámbula (Fernando Spiner)
Velvet Goldmine (Todd Haynes)
1999
eXistenZ (David Cronenberg)
Muppets from Space (Tim Hill)
Spectres of the Spectrum (Craig Baldwin)
Wild Zero (Tetsuro Takeuchi)
2000
Batoru rowaiaru/Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku)
Donggam/Ditto (Jeong-kwon Kim)
Happy Accidents (Brad Anderson)
Pitch Black (David Twohy)
Possible Worlds (Robert Lepage)
2001
The American Astronaut (Cory McAbee)
Avalon (Mamoru Oshii)
CQ (Roman Coppola)
Electric Dragon 80,000 V (Sogo Ishii)
Hey, Happy! (Noam Gonick)
Kairo/Pulse (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
2002
2009: Lost Memories (Si-myung Lee)
Cypher (Vincenzo Natali)
Rokugatsu no hebi/A Snake of June (Tsukamoto Shinya)
Teknolust (Lynn Hershman-Leeson)
2003
Akarui mirai/Bright Future (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Bedwin Hacker (Nadia El Fani)
Dopperugengâ/Doppelganger (Kiyoshi Kurosawa)
Jigureul jikyeora!/Save the Green Planet (Joon-Hwan Jang)
Koi… Mil Gaya (Rakesh Roshan)
Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women (Manish Jha)
Patalghar (Abhijit Choudhury)
Le temps du loup/Time of the Wolf (Michael Haneke)
2004
2046 (Wong Kar-wai)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry)
The Final Cut (Omar Naim)
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (Mamoru Oshii)
G.O.R.A. (Ömer Faruk Sorak)
Primer (Shane Carruth)
part nine, 2005-14
Mark Bould 