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; its reputation was built over the following decade. Loosely adapted from P. D. James's 1992 novel, it 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 fixed reference point for action filmmaking; both sequences contain hidden cuts, though at the time many people believed, wrongly, that they were unbroken.

The film received three Oscar nominations and two BAFTA wins. Slavoj Žižek wrote the contemporary essay on it that is still most often quoted, arguing that its true subject was the displaced refugee at the centre of every Western nation. Its foresight (a Britain consumed by hostility to migrants, an exhausted political left, an authoritarian drift) has only sharpened with time.

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. It was a commercial disappointment on release and has climbed higher in every critical reappraisal since.