The two standout science-fiction films of 2025

From Mickey 17 and M3gan 2.0 to a musical about the end of the world, this was an eclectic year for science-fiction films. Some ideas are so compelling, so intuitive, one would sooner recycle them than take them apart to explore. So, in 1950, Isaac Asimov fixed up some puzzle stories into a fiendish, Agatha Christie-in-space sci-fi novel, I, Robot, while in 1968, Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey set a high bar for films about (or at least containing) artificial intelligence. There, ideas-wise, the story of robots in cinema pretty much starts to repeat on an endless loop. This year, The Electric State spun a yarn about a robot rebellion, M3gan 2.0 showed you can't keep a good killerbot down and Companion took the femmebot's point of view to give us a decent adult-themed Asimov pastiche. All three toyed with the usual notions around free will and indulged in handwringing about when to treat a machine like a person.