Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome (2012)

Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome (2012) poster
Rating: 3.5

Web-series/film prequel to the 2003-9 revival of Battlestar Galactica with a rookie Commander Adama arriving aboard the Galactica. Easily one the best of the Galactica spinoff films to date

Battlestar Galactica (1978)

Battlestar Galactica (1978) poster
Rating: 2

The original Battlestar Galactica tv series was an incredibly blatant copy built on the success of Star Wars. This is the pilot, which aired on tv in the US but was released theatrically to theatres in other countries

Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007)

Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007) poster
Rating: 3.5

A spinoff film from the Battlestar Galactica revival series that flashes back to tell the story of the divisive figure of Commander Cain, featuring fine performances and the series’ usual high level of writing

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (2009)

Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (2009) poster
Rating: 3.5

This was the second of the films spun off from the 2000s Battlestar Galactica revival series, and ingeniously retells the events of the series as seen through the eyes of the Cylons

Battletruck (1982)

Battletruck (1982) poster
Rating: 2.5

A fairly blatant copy of Mad Max 2, although this is one of the better-made and budgeted. Crucially what is lacking is much in the way of the action that made Mad Max a hit

Beach Babes from Beyond (1993)

Beach Babes from Beyond (1993) poster
Rating: 0-

Prolific low-budget hack David DeCoteau directs what feels like a very softcore version of a Gidget film crossbred with Earth Girls Are Easy (albeit with the sexes reversed). A film that quickly sinks into awfulness

The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell (2006)

The Beach Party at the Threshold of Hell (2006) poster
Rating: 0-

A gonzo post holocaust film that was put out under the National Lampoon label. Beyond having a great title, this represents as close to near-total ineptitude in filmmaking as it is possible to get

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) poster
Rating: 2.5

A classic of the genre for a number of reason – it was the film that kicked off the 1950s fad for atomic monsters, featuring an archetypal story about a dinosaur brought back to life by atomic tests. It also featured among the very first screen credits for both Ray Bradbury and stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen

Becoming Bond (2017)

Becoming Bond (2017) poster
Rating: 3.5

Documentary about George Lazenby, the former male model who scored the role of James Bond in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and then abruptly quit. Lazenby proves a highly entertaining raconteur and his life story is eye-opening to say the very least

The Bed Sitting Room (1969)

The Bed Sitting Room (1969) poster
Rating: 3.5

Richard Lester adapts an absurdist Spike Milligan play set in the aftermath of the nuclear holocaust where the survivors are mutating into animals and items of furniture. A film with a really bizarre sense of humour that most at the time did not get

Before the Fire (2020)

Before the Fire (2020) poster
Rating: 2

Released in March 2020 just before the arrival of Covid-19, this makes an uncanny prediction about the US being affected by a nationwide pandemic

Beginning of the End (1957)

Beginning of the End (1957) poster
Rating: 2

Giant grasshoppers invade Chicago – what’s not to like? A sterling example of the 1950s atomically enlarged insect film from Bert I. Gordon who found his calling make cheap giant animals/people films during this era.

Behind the Planet of the Apes (1998)

Behind the Planet of the Apes (1998) poster
Rating: 3

A documentary about the original Planet of the Apes series (made before the modern reboot series), this examines the making of and behind the scenes in all the detail that any fan could want

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970)

Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970) poster
Rating: 3.5

The second and most underrated of the Planet of the Apes films. For a time it repeats the original but gains considerable imagination and a striking satiric bite with the introduction of the mutants

The Bermuda Triangle (1979)

The Bermuda Triangle (1979) poster
Rating: 2

A documentary that purports to examine the mystery of the disappearances in the so-called Bermuda Triangle but soon dives off into an hilarious series of claims involving UFOs, Atlantis, time warps and The Philadelphia Experiment

The Beyond (2017)

The Beyond (2017) poster
Rating: 2

A highly ambitious film about a mysterious alien portal that appears in Earth orbit and the attempts to explore what is on the other side

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010)

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2010) poster
Rating: 1

A homage to 1970s SF cinema, full of trippy journeys through transcendental space and white antisceptic corridors. In aiming for this look, the film also forgot a small thing like a plot or coherent explanation of what is happening

Bicentennial Man (1999)

Bicentennial Man (1999) poster
Rating: 1

Isaac Asimov may not have been the best science-fiction writer ever but his stories buzzed with challenging ideas. In the hands of Chris Columbus, one of Asimov’s robot stories is reduced to mawkish sentimentalism

The Big Bang (1987)

The Big Bang (1987) poster
Rating: 2

French-Belgian adult animated film in the gonzo trippy vein of Ralph Bakshi and Bill Plympton – a visually madcap satire of science-fiction tropes and 1980s East-West tensions, full of wackily surreal visuals

The Big Bus (1976)

The Big Bus (1976) poster
Rating: 2

Intermittently amusing parody of the disaster movie set aboard an atomically-powered luxury bus where everything proceeds to go wrong. The better parody of the genre would have to wait for Airplane

Big Hero 6 (2014)

Big Hero 6 (2014) poster
Rating: 2.5

Disney animation and Marvel Comics come together; Marvel loses and most of the comic-book is tossed out the window and this becomes a simple story about a boy and his robot story before settling into familiar sueprheroics

Big Trouble (2002)

Big Trouble (2002) poster
Rating: 2

A flop comedy based on a Dave Barry novel about various characters trying to obtain a nuclear weapon. Despite a reasonable name cast, this becomes slapstick inanity in director Barry Sonnenfeld’s hands

BigBug (2022)

Bigbug (2022) poster
Rating: 3

French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet of The City of Lost Children and Amelie fame returns with an appealingly eccentric, beautifully designed comedic take on the machine revolution

Bigfoot vs The Illuminati (2020)

Bigfoot vs the Illuminati (2020) poster
Rating: 1

From the director of Trump vs the Illuminati, gonzo animation where Bigfoot and several resurrected historical figures fight off invading aliens that include Stalin, Aleister Crowley and Anubis

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

Bill and Ted Face the Music (2020) poster
Rating: 2

The two time-travelling slackers are back after nearly thirty years and the film amusingly sees them having reached uneasy middle-age. But was the wait worth it?

Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991)

Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey (1991) poster
Rating: 2

The sequel to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure where the first film’s humour gets lost amid repetition and blown up by a big-budget. William Sadler’s Death however proves a scene-stealer

Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) poster
Rating: 3.5

A quirky hit that jumped aboard the 1980s popularity of time travel themes and laid into them with an appealingly offbeat eccentricity. The film that propelled Keanu Reeves onto become a star

Bill the Galactic Hero (2014)

Bill the Galactic Hero (2014) poster
Rating: 0-

Harry Harrison’s Bill the Galactic Hero is hands down the funniest science-fiction book of all time; it is painful watching it rendered in the hands of Alex Cox who has only the budget and resources of an amateur film

Billion Dollar Brain (1967)

Billion Dollar Brain (1967) poster
Rating: 2

Third of the Harry Palmer spy films starring Michael Caine, which were made as a more grounded alternative to James Bond. Unfortunately, this has been placed in the hands of Ken Russell who overblows everything with a giddy eatravagance

Bird Box (2018)

Bird Box (2018) poster
Rating: 2.5

Very similar to A Quiet Place from several months earlier where here people cannot look outdoors and must remain blindfolded. Hindered by a frustrating lack of any explanations as to what is happening

Bird Box: Barcelona (2023)

Bird Box Barcelona (2023) poster
Rating: 3

Bird Box was a hit on Netflix and this is a sequel. The talented Pastor Brothers take the basics of the original and actually make a much better film out of them filled with fine tension

The Black Hole (1979)

The Black Hole (1979) poster
Rating: 2

Disney’s attempt to join the post-Star Wars SF boom proved a flop that flounders in bad writing and ponderous pretensions. On the other hand, it is almost worth watching for the stunning design and effects

Black Hollow Cage (2017)

Black Hollow Cage (2017) poster
Rating: 4

Cryptic Spanish film that eventually coalesces into a unique time travel story, like a more enigmatic version of Timecrimes as we watch pieces of a beautifully wrought temporal jigsaw puzzle slot into place

Black Mask 2: City of Masks (2002)

Black Mask 2: City of Masks (2002) poster
Rating: 3

Tsui Hark takes over the directorial reins of the sequel, filling it with much more fantastical elements, pitting the hero against a mad scientist and his mutant creations in a series of wild martial arts scenes

Black Panther (2018)

Black Panther (2018) poster
Rating: 3

The most successful Marvel Comics adaptation of all-time up to that point. Enjoyable if I fall short of calling it the best Marvel film ever and its receiving a nomination for a Best Picture Academy Award

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) poster
Rating: 2

The MCU’s sequel to Black Panther. This offers the peculiarity of a work in which the superhero of the title never actually appears and is instead set around his absence following the death of Chadwick Boseman

Black Road (2016)

Rating: 2

Near future set science-fiction noir as a cyborg-enhanced hero is drawn in to conduct an investigation on behalf of a morally ambiguous femme fatale. Despite a reasonable effort made, this is a little too low key

Black Widow (2021)

Black Widow (2021) poster
Rating: 3

The first MCU film to emerge since the Great Pause of the pandemic, the question is whether one of the least interesting characters in The Avengers can carry a film all by herself

The Blackout (2019)

The Blackout (2019) poster
Rating: 3

An impressively large-scale SF film about a military sortie into an area of western Russian that is all that is left unaffected after aliens create a worldwide power cut

Blade Runner (1982)

Blade Runner (1982) poster
Rating: 5

Ridley Scott’s film was not a success at the time but has since become regarded as a SF masterpiece, one of the defining screen treatments of android themes while the incredibly dense and detailed vision of the future was copied by dozens of subsequent films

Blade Runner 2049 (2017)

Blade Runner 2049 (2017) poster
Rating: 4.5

Blade Runner is a landmark classic but this is well worthwhile sequel from Denis Villeneuve that recreates the fascinating Cyberpunk world in more detail and expands out on the themes laid down in the original. Made with impeccably beautiful detail

Blast from the Past (1999)

Blast from the Past (1999) poster
Rating: 2

A comedy with the amusing premise where Brendan Fraser is raised in a nuclear fallout shelter since the Cuban Missile Crisis and emerges into the present for the first time, mistaking it for a post-apocalyptic world

Blasted (2022)

Blasted (2022) poster
Rating: 2

Norwegian comedy where two friends who were a champion laser tag duo in their teens are now in adult life where they are forced to pair back up to fight off alien invaders

Blindness (2008)

Blindness (2008) poster
Rating: 4

A hugely underrated film that depicts the brutal collapse of society that occurs when the entire world is affected by a plague that causes blindness. Directed in strong and powerful images

The Block Island Sound (2020)

The Block Island Sound (2020) poster
Rating: 3

An enigmatic and undeniably effective film about mysterious happenings where those who journey into a bay start to be affected in disturbing ways

The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968)

The Blood of Fu Manchu (1968) poster
Rating: 2

The fourth of the Christopher Lee-starring Fu Manchu films and the point the series was handed over to exploitation director Jess Franco and started to go badly downhill

Blood on Melies’ Moon (2016)

Blood on Melies' Moon (2016) poster
Rating: 2

Luigi Cozzi’s return to screens after 26 years, a head-scratchingly bizarre effort overloaded with ideas about parallel worlds, cosmic journeys and homage to the early cinema of Georges Melies and others

Bloodshot (2020)

Bloodshot (2020) poster
Rating: 2

That starts out seeming a standard mindless action film in which Vin Diesel is resurrected as an augmented super-soldier only for everything we assume to get turned on its head in interesting ways

Blue Beetle (2023)

Blue Beetle (2023) poster
Rating: 2

The DC Comics superhero Blue Beetle, one of the Teen Titans, is given his own film. One of the more quickly forgettable entries among DC Comics’ attempts to compete with the MCU

Bodies (2023)

Bodies (2023) poster
Rating: 3.5

A smart, intelligent tv mini-series that conducts a murder mystery that ranges between the 1890s and 2050s, before arriving at an ingenious and clever SF explanation

Body Snatchers (1993)

Body Snatchers (1993) poster
Rating: 4

Abel Ferrara’s remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers is an overlooked film that settles in with an undeniable creepiness that is just as effective as the earlier versions. The metaphor for the pod people is more diffuse in this one but that does not mitigate the film’s effect

The Book of Eli (2010)

The Book of Eli (2010) poster
Rating: 2

Denzel Washington as an enigmatic Man With No Name wandering the post-holocaust apocalyptic landscape. This follows the cliches of the genre before it bizarrely morphs into a Biblical allegory partway through

Borderlands (2024)

Borderlands (2024) poster
Rating: 2

Eli Roth adapts the popular videogame and corrals a surprisingly high-profile cast in a knockabout planetary adventure. Alas, that met a very mixed reception and was widely regarded as a bad movie

Borealis (2013)

Borealis (2013) poster
Rating: 2

A pilot for a tv series that never went ahead set in a future where Global Warming has turned the Arctic into a thawed-out tundra where various countries seek to claim the new territory

Boss Level (2020)

Boss Level (2020) poster
Rating: 3

You don’t think the mix of cartoonishly over-the-top action and a Groundhog Day timeloop scenario would work but this proves your assumptions wrong in highly entertaining ways

The Bourne Legacy (2012)

The Bourne Legacy (2012) poster
Rating: 2

A reboot of the Jason Bourne series with Jeremy Renner replacing Matt Damon. The exhiliratingly kinetic action scenes are watered down, while the plot lacks the same focus. The first of the series to enter genre territory however