Children of Men

Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men arrived in 2006, between Y Tu Mamá También and Gravity, and was a commercial disappointment on release; the cultural canonisation came over the following decade. Loosely adapted from P. D. James's 1992 novel, the film is set in 2027, eighteen years into an unexplained global infertility crisis, with refugees being rounded up into camps in a Britain that has become the last functioning state.

Theo (Clive Owen), a former activist now drinking his way through a meaningless civil-service job, is dragged out of his exhaustion when his ex-wife Julian (Julianne Moore) enlists him to help smuggle a young African refugee, Kee, who has inexplicably become pregnant. The film moves through a Britain of internment fences, terrorist bombings, and detention camps. Emmanuel Lubezki's long-take cinematography — the car ambush, the refugee-camp battle — became a permanent reference point for action filmmaking; both sequences contain hidden cuts but were widely (and falsely) reputed at the time to be unbroken.

The film received three Oscar nominations and two BAFTA wins. Slavoj Žižek wrote the most-cited contemporary essay on it, arguing that its true subject was the displaced refugee at the centre of every Western nation. The film's prescience — a Britain consumed by hostility to migrants, an exhausted political left, an authoritarian drift — has only sharpened.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most accurate piece of speculative fiction the 21st century has produced about Western Europe, and one of the few science fiction films to take its political setting more seriously than its premise. A commercial disappointment on release that has steadily climbed every critical reappraisal since.