The Best Sci-Fi Movies of 2021

Oscar Isaac gets quite naked, and then he gets quite dead. Timothée Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, falls in love with a girl, played by Zendaya, who's on screen for all of seven minutes. They barely speak; most of their courtship proceeds in visions and hazy dreams--the safest of social distances. Not that most real-world teens would even play Seven Minutes in Heaven these days. If they didn't already prefer to achieve sexual awakening as Paul does--remotely--then the past two years of Covid-19 protocols will have inculcated in their psyches the belief that a policy of No Touching is not only law-abiding but, for a lot of them, ideal.