In no particular order:

Dark City - Compelling set design that, for once, is not altogether beholden to Blade Runner.

Gattaca & Code 46 - A pair of thoughtful, low-budget films that explore some possible permutations of the revolution in genomics.

The Fly - Cronenberg's version works both as a straight-up exercise in drenching horror and as a sophisticated meditation on aging, disease, death.

Solaris - Tarkovsky's original 1972 production is haunting provided you can gear yourself down to it, and very Russian in its sensibilities. Soderbergh's version is not to much a remake as a reimagining, and in its own way has some worthy things to say about memory and grief.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers - Some purists prefer the 1950s original, but for my money Phil Kaufmann's eerie 1978 version is unsurpassed for creepiness and paranoia.

1984 - Shot right there in Airstrip One in spring of 1984, and about the best job of rendering the novel to film that I think could have been done. John Hurt and Richard Burton are fine as the doomed Winston Smith and the imperturbable O'Brien.

Death Watch - Impossible to find on video unfortunately, although it was once available on VHS in mutilated form. Harvey Keitel is a journalist whose eyes have been replaced by undetectable electronic prosthetics. He is assigned to follow and record the last days of unsuspecting Romy Schneider, a woman dying of a rare incurable disease in a world from which premature death has been largely banished.

The Lathe of Heaven - This would be the 1979 version, not the contemptible travesty released under the same name in 2002. Psychiatrist on county payroll realizes that delusional patient who claims he can alter reality isn't delusional after all. Psychiatrist has strong ideas about how reality might be improved. A thinking person's sci-fi done on a budget that you or I could raise by turning out our sofa cushions. Can be seen as a critique of Great Society liberalism or merely as an acting out of the law of unintended consequences.

Zardoz - In the so-bad-it's-good category, I can think of no other science fiction flick that soars to such stratospheric levels of unintended hilarity. John Boorman has magically created the kind of bad movie that you'd ordinarily have to apply to Ken Russell to make. Of course, Charlotte Rampling scampering around nekkid on and off does nothing to detract from this production's quirky charms.

cordially,