This is, of course, just our opinion, and feel free to disagree in comments. We went back and forth about several of these films, and there were a few others that we almost included instead, so we're not claiming infallibility here. If you want to view this in non-gallery format, click here, and I promise it'll work.

Pitch Black. This is nearly the perfect movie — a gritty anti-hero with weird eyes that can see in the dark is on a prison ship, which crashes on an alien planet. The lurking monsters are ominous and alarming, but the film's real mystery is Riddick himself — the Furyan inspires loathing, hero-worship and a desperate longing for the anti-hero to become a hero by the movie's end. Like Riddick's own eyes, our view of him only really works when we see him through total darkness.

Avatar. I'm going to post my review of this film in a few days, closer to its actual release date. But this is definitely one of the decade's most significant science-fiction films, both in its startling new look and in its elaborate alien world. Sigourney Weaver is one of the few heroic scientists we've seen in movies lately, and she fearlessly spouts facts about the science of Pandora. Avatar is by no means a perfect movie — it's a frustrating mixture of brilliance and utter cheese — but it's clearly an important movie in science-fiction history.

Slither. This movie sort of slid (I'm tempted to say slithered) under the radar, but it's one of the great all-time alien possession movies, and a brilliant metaphor for being trapped in a bad marriage. An alien parasite lands in a small town and takes over a woman's awful husband — and then it starts infecting everyone else in town, so that they all speak with the husband's voice. Wherever the wife goes, she hears her husband talking to her. And then people start getting grotesquely pregnant with alien offspring — this sort of thing is really why body horror was invented.

Star Trek. A young hero reluctantly starts to claim his true destined greatness... only to find out that his whole life has been altered, and maybe wrecked, by time-traveling, tattooed maniacs from the future. It's a weird spin on a Star Trek movie, but considering how hard it was to imagine being thrilled by another Trek after Nemesis, this film is a marvel. Plot holes, frat-boy antics, "red matter" and all, it's still the film that recharged Star Trek and may have helped bring back space-opera as a genre. And Spock has never been so... fascinating.

Donnie Darko has garnered an enduring cult fan base, for good reason. Its blend of mysicism and weird physics has aged amazingly well, and we still get lost in its "tangent universes." We keep hoping Richard Kelly will make another film that's both as mind-blowing and as well-constructed as this one.

Robot Stories. Another great movie that didn't get enough props when it came out. Greg Pak, who went on to write the Planet Hulk storyline for Marvel Comics, creates an anthology of three stories about robots that show how much robots are connected to our emotional lives — and what will happen when robots get emotions. In one story, two office robots fall in love, only to find that robot love is forbidden. In another story, a mother becomes determined to help her dying son amass the perfect collection of robot action figures — at any cost, even stealing. You'll see robots in a whole new light after watching this film.

Spider-Man 2. There were a number of superhero films that managed to bring the greatness of comics' storylines to life in the first half of the decade, including two X-Men movies and two Spider-Man movies. For my money, though, this is the best of the bunch, particularly because of Alfred Molina's Doc Octopus. Peter Parker's superpowered angst collides with Doc Octopus' cyborg identity crisis, and both hero and villain seem to be clinging to their identities by a thread. Even though we wish Peter Parker could keep his damn mask on, it's still thrilling and maybe the most perfect straight-up superhero movie of all.

Sleep Dealer. Alex Rivera's look at the dark side of telecommuting is one of the most memorable and intense films we've seen lately. In the future, everything depends on the dollar — you can't even access water reservoirs in Mexico or speak to your family in another town without feeding dollars into a slot. And the only way to get dollars is to get cyber nodes all over your body, allowing your nervous system to pilot machines in the United States. That way the U.S. can import Mexican labor without bringing in actual Mexicans. It's beautifully filmed and harrowing look at the ultimate form of alienated labor.

The Incredibles. The other great straight-up superhero was one of several Pixar films that we wanted to pay tribute to from the past decade. If you were as disappointed as we were by the two Fantastic Four films, then rejoice that this film does the FF right. A surprisingly light-hearted look at super-mutants in a world that learns to fear them, this movie does a better job of portraying what makes superhero comics so awesome than almost any live-action film. And we love the Omnidroid.

The Host. Sorry, Cloverfield — this was the monster-rampage movie we loved from the past few years. Unlike Clovey, the Host actually has a decent if snarky origin story, including weird chemicals dropped in the water by a callous American, causing one of the local creatures to get a little too big (and rambunctious) for comfort. More than almost any other monster movie, this film sucks us into caring about its main characters, a hapless family who operate a failing fast-food stand on the beach — we laugh at their antics and then get hopelessly, tragically, wound up in their fate when they tangle with the monster. Rob and Hud just don't quite measure up.

28 Days Later. Purists may hate this film's "fast zombies," but they're not even really zombies — they're the victims of a "rage" virus that stupid animal-rights activists cause to be released onto an unsuspecting world. Of all the apocalyptic scenarios we've seen in the past decade, 28 Days provides the best dose of terror and the sheer horror of society unraveling. When Christopher Eccleston's vicious soldier says the words, "I promised them women," your gut sinks. And the idea that the rage-virus outbreak will cure itself because the quasi-zombies will starve is genuinely clever. We were tempted to include Danny Boyle's other great SF film of the decade, Sunshine, but 28 Days is clearly better.

Paprika. A parade of nonsense images stomps through a man's dreams, forcing him to jump out a window... and it's just the beginning of the mayhem as the dream world collides with reality, in Satoshi Kon's weird exploration of dreams and their potential to tear our world apart. A machine that allows you to enter someone's dreams therapeutically gets stolen, and soon reality itself is being torn apart. Trippy, insane and mind-expanding, this is a film you need to watch more than once.

Primer. Speaking of films you need to watch more than once... few, if any, science-fiction movies talk down to their audiences less than this one. You don't even realize, for a good chunk of the movie, that the geeky characters are building a time machine. and it comes with very realistic and fascinating limitations, even as it allows the main characters to cross their own timelines over and over again, rewriting history in more and more psychotic ways. The walkman scene makes the whole thing worthwhile, just by itself.

Moon. It's interesting how many of the great science-fiction movies of the past decade are about loneliness, one way or the other — but none of them delve into isolation as hauntingly as Duncan Jones' debut feature. Sam Rockwell is amazing as the two versions of Sam Bell, who's tantalizingly close to finishing out his contract on a lunary mining station — until he finds out that things aren't ever what they seem. Add paranoia to the list of things this film does better than almost any other.

Iron Man. As we wrote when this film came out, it's actually more of a cyborg narrative than a superhero one. Jon Favreau and company wisely chose to focus on the heart of Tony Stark's origin — literally, the fusion reactor that keeps his heart from stopping, and turns him into a part-machine badass whose armor is just a shell that goes over his cybernetic body. Tony Stark's uneasy relationship with the military technology that he created parallels his unease with his new technological body — he's like the heroic flipside of Spider-Man 2's Doctor Octopus. And yes, any movie that talks about our dependence on, and unease with, technology automatically gets to leap over the pile of by-the-numbers superhero films.

The Dark Knight. See here for our argument as to why this film really is science fiction. Shorter version: Batman's fantastical technology is at the heart of the story. If Batman Begins showed how Bruce Wayne used technology to become Gotham's fearsome crime-fighter, then The Dark Knight is about how far he's willing to take that approach in the face of a mad bomber.

District 9. Most science-fiction movies, you come out of furiously debating the science or the finer points of the storyline... but this one, people walked out of speechless and shellshocked. Perhaps the ultimate "humans oppress aliens" movie, this film confronts us with a perfect allegory of our own inhumanity, through the story of a crashlanded group of aliens who are forced into shantytowns. Even before the main character, Wikus, starts turning into one of the aliens, our loyalties are getting more and more divided.

Wall-E. The other Pixar movie we couldn't help including on the list, this may have been the greatest blend of post-apocalyptic dystopia and cute robots. The love between Wall-E and Eve is both lovable and genuinely moving, and the trademark Pixar humor is in full effect with Wall-E's junkyard slapstick and spaceship antics. The funniest, and maybe the best, robot uprising we've ever seen.

Serenity. Just pretend for a second that this wasn't the continuation of a beloved TV series, and that Joss Whedon had created a whole new universe from scratch just for this film — it would still be one of the most audacious, most memorable, science-fiction films of all time. The story of the Alliance, which maintains a tenuous grip on a sprawling star system after a brutal civil war, and the lengths to which the Alliance will go to try and make people "better," Serenity is one of the great action-adventure films as well as one of the neatest SF concepts ever. When you discover the secrets of Miranda and see how River Tam becomes both the messenger and the avenger of Miranda's people, it's hard not to jump up and down in your seat.

Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. How far are you willing to go to get over a lost love? Are you willing to injure yourself — by erasing a huge chunk of your brief time on this planet from your own mind — just to get back at your former lover? This Charlie Kaufman/Michel Gondry joint does what all the best science fiction does: it creates a fictional technology that has the potential to change who we are as people, and then it uses it to tell a deeply personal story. The scenes where Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are wandering through Carrey's childhood memories are both unsettling and poignant, as Carrey tries to hold on to the love he was in the process of throwing away — by letting her into more of his mind.

As near as I can find out, there's only one horror movie that actually involves Alzheimer's directly: in Renny Harlin's Deep Blue Sea (1999), scientists are trying to find a cure for Alzheimer's. So (as one naturally would) they genetically engineer SUPER SHARKS with amazing brains. What can possibly go wrong? Oh, yes. The shark thing, is what can go wrong.

Here's a good chunk of that movie, which conveniently starts out with the foolhardy scientists explaining their scheme to Samuel L. Jackson, and ends with indications that things are going wrong. (I do not think Jackson, at any point, utters the words, "Get these motherfucking super-sharks out of this motherfucking seabase." More's the pity.)

But that movie just uses Alzheimer's as a plot device. If you're looking for stories that actually play on our fears of Alzheimer's and what it means to our tenuous grasp of personhood, you have to look a bit further afield. And as Sir Michael Caine says, Alzheimer's is scarier than any shark, no matter how big.

But here are the ways in which i think we're starting to see the rise of horror that takes about Alzheimer's, obliquely rather than dead on.

Forgetting:

There's been a rise in stories about people's memories getting siphoned off. I have a vague but vivid memory of reading a comic book (or maybe seeing a TV show) with baddie who exults in erasing people's memories, and says things like, "I just took your memories of your mother," with a smirk. But I can't for the life of me remember where I saw this — almost as if my memory had been erased, fiendishly. And googling has turned up nothing. (Any suggestions?)

(Update: Thanks to everyone who commented. I think Ian Cyr is right, and it's a recent issue of Green Lantern Corps. by Dave Gibbons et al., featuring a baddie with mental powers. Although, someone reminded me The Surgeon General does something quite similar in Give Me Liberty by Frank Miller and, yes, Gibbons again. But it's fascinating how many other examples people came up with.)

In any case, there are lots of other examples of recent stories about mind-erasure. Dollhouse is an obvious example, which asks explicitly what's left of us after our memories have been stolen away. (And comes up with a moderately hopeful answer, over time: There's still something that remains even after our minds are gone, although it's hard to define.)

Heroes has the walking plot device, the Haitian, who mostly just shows up and zaps some of your memories whenever HRG or someone else needs a little memory lapse — then wanders off to do his own thing, until he's needed to henchman up again. But there is that one super-creepy bit where HRG is interrogating his former mentor in Russia, and he gets the Haitian to zap bits of the mentor's memory, piece by piece, gloating the whole time. You get the full scariness of being unable to remember your mother, or your wife, or other bits of your past.

Torchwood season two had Adam, the guy who insinuates himself into your memories. Smallville had Lex getting some super-advanced electro-shock therapy, which erased seven months of his memory, and being shattered as a result. DC Comics grappled with the ethics of the magician Zatanna erasing people's memories in "Identity Crisis." Acheron Hades in the Thursday Next series has shown a propensity for zapping people's memories as well. Various X-Men have gone around zapping memories of late, including Rogue, Professor X and Jean Gray. (And in
one recent X-Men comic, Emma Frost sadistically erases an assassin's only happy memory, vowing to do worse if the assassin comes back. In Mark Millar's Authority issues, the Evil Doctor also gets off on nuking people's memories.

The 2001 movie Time Lapse features someone who's been dosed with a memory-erasing drug, rushing to stop an evil nuclear scheme before his memory goes away completely. Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind featured people paying to have memories selectively erased, only to discover how terrifying that is in practice. And Dark City was all about people's memories being rearranged every night.

I feel like this is just scratching the surface — there's a lot of fiction right now talking about how fragile your memories are — and how, if they go, what's left may or may not be recognizeably "you."

The shambling hordes:

And then there's the fact that we're seeing a proliferation of zombie movies, which are all about people who are falling apart physically and have lost all of their personality and sense of identity. As someone who's lost a few close relatives to Alzheimer's, slowly and horribly, it's easy for me to recognize how zombies are a metaphor for this dissolution of the self. People with Alzheimer's are still conscious and aware, they still move around and seem to respond to stimuli, but as disease progresses they get less and less capable of reasoning or having any kind of meaningful interaction with anyone around them. It's heart breaking and horrible — the person you knew is still there, but no longer really him- or herself.

As I pointed out a while ago, the zombie movie which comes closest to depicting the awfulness of losing a parent to Alzheimer's is Peter Jackson's Dead Alive, which is also sometimes called Braindead:

Quasi-zombie movie I Am Legend even makes the link clearer by showing that the "zombies" still have vestiges of humanity and are capable of caring about each other. In the movie's original ending, Robert Neville is able to get through to the zombies and help them remember they used to be people — he comes up with a cure for their condition, and is able to get through to them. Because their real problem isn't that they're feral or mindless — it's that they've forgotten themselves.

The movie Fido also plays with this fairly explictly, by having the main character's dad become a docile, enslaved zombie by the end. He's still recognizeably the same old dad, but the biggest change is that he's lost most of his mind.

Obviously, a huge part of the zombie fad simply comes from the fact that they're a cool way to have an apocalyptic scenario — they're unstoppable and nasty, and if they bite you, you're screwed. They have many of the hallmarks of a good monster: loud, relentless, biting, overwhelming. But at the same time, as the zombie genre continues to expand and diversify, people are using zombies as metaphors for a bunch of different things — and one of those things, clearly, is having a loved one disappear, inexorably into the mists of forgetting.

So if it's true that we're only just seeing the beginning of the onslaught of dementia in our rapidly aging societies, you can expect to see more fantastical and science-fictional stories that attempt to capture the madness of it all. As Caine says, no monster can ever be as scary as Alzheimer's... but some monsters can help us come to terms with it.

Thanks to Kevin Schmidt, Morgan Johnson, Capt. Snowdon, Lynae Straw, Michael Wilson, Martina de la Cruz, Nivair H. Gabriel and anyone else I missed.

Hoffman is suffering from some weird disorder that is causing all his autonomic nervous system functions to break down. And it looks as though Hoffman's warehouse is inside a larger warehouse, and also the model of New York seems to contain a model of the warehouse — apparently with its own model of New York inside. As Life Without Buildings points out:

When this film was announced last year, I wondered what would happen if we discovered that the portion of New York being reproduced includes the very warehouse within which the model is being constructed? Is it possible that the play will include an actor hired to play the director, who then hires an actor to play himself? Will this create some sort of infinite spacial vortex, like two face-to-face mirrors, the land-o-lakes butter label, or some sort of spatial Tristram Shandy? Judging from what we’ve seen so far, it looks like that’s exactly what happens.

It's worth reading the whole reaction, which references my favorite Paul Auster novel, The Music Of Chance. [Yahoo! Movies and Life Without Buildings]

Kaufman reportedly wrote Synecdoche for long-time collaborator Spike Jonze, but ended up directing it himself. IMDB has a pretty detailed synopsis, and a columnist for the L.A. Times got a leaked draft back in 2006.

In a nutshell, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director who's directed Death of a Salesman in the small town of Schenectady, NY. He gets a MacArthur grant to do a Broadway production, and wants to create a work of "brutal realism and honesty." So he gathers a cast in a warehouse in New York's theater district and directs them in a "celebration of the mundane," living out their lives in a scale model of New York itself. (Hence "Synecdoche.")

The city model inside the warehouse gets bigger and more detailed, and meanwhile, Hoffman's character is dying of some mysterious disease that shuts down his autonomic functions one by one. (And that's where it starts to sound science ficitonal.) A lot of the movie deals with the women in Hoffman's life, including his painter ex-wife (Catherine Keener), his daughter, who lives with his ex-wife's friend (Jennifer Jason Leigh), his current wife (Michelle Williams), his mentally disabled second daughter, and his self-promoting therapist (Hope Davis).

As the movie goes on, years pass and Hoffman is still in his sprawling scale model of New York. Reality gets more and more blurred with fantasy, especially as the actor Hoffman has hired to play him does too good a job and becomes almost indistinguishable from the real Hoffman. The cast and crew of the play becomes full of dopplegangers. Hoffman's only hope may be a celebrated theater actress who joins the cast.

So in other words, the mini-New York in Synecdoche becomes an altered state of mind for Hoffman, and a metaphor for his shrinking world. Just like the way that places become states of mind in some of Kaufman's other films:

• In Being John Malkovich, a hidden trap door in an office building turns out to lead into the mind of a famous actor. You can walk inside and spend a while experiencing Malkovich's life. Or, if you're Malkovich himself, you just get a trippy experience. It's like the mind of Malkovich is just an extension of the workplace, another office.
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• In Adaptation, the Florida swamp becomes the gateway to an altered state of mind. It's the place where you find the mind-altering orchids that turn a New Yorker writer into a murdering freakazoid. The swamp is also the place where the identities of the two Kaufmans start to blur together.
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• And then there's the Montauk Long Island Railroad station where Clem and Joel remeet after erasing their memories in Eternal Sunshine, as if they can re-access the mental space of their relationship by going back to that location. Not only that, but most of the film consists Joel traveling to different locations in his memory, revisiting places and experiences as they're rewritten. The film's horror comes from the fact that we travel back to the same locations over and over again, but they're changing — and in one case being demolished around us.
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• Okay, this one is a bit of a stretch. But in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Chuck Barris is able to access a whole other side of his personality, that of CIA killer and total bad-ass, only by going to Europe. Europe becomes a whole other hemisphere of Barris' mind.

• Danny Boyle chose to make Sunshine instead of the sequel to 28 Days Later, because he's not a custodian, he's an innovator. (Although he's hinted lately he may make 28 Years Later.) Boyle has alternated between science fiction movies and "realistic" films with surreal touches. Trainspotting and Shallow Grave are both set in the real world, but a veil of unreality clings to both of them. (Not just the ceiling baby, but Ewan McGregor's unraveling characters in both films.) Zombie movie 28 Days Latermanages the near-impossible: it actually manages to feel post-apocalyptic without killing off its entire cast in the first half hour. But Sunshine is Boyle's greatest achievement. The story of a small crew on a desperate mission tor reignite the sun, it manages to blend the horror thriller with the trippy cosmic film. But both genres have a steel underpinning of hard science and psychological complexity, and everything feels like it's happening for a real reason. Upcoming project: Boyle's next film is Slumdog Millionaire, about an illiterate kid who tries to become a contestant on a Hindi game show.
• Guillermo Del Toro is best known for the acclaimed Pan's Labyrinth, one of the most powerful — and darkest — explorations of escapism ever filmed. But he also made two of the best genetic-engineering thrillers of all time: Blade II and Mimic. (Mimic was originally supposed to be a 30-minute segment in an "anthology" film featuring a segment from Boyle.) Both films feature monsters created by science. In Mimic, a scientist creates a super-insect to destroy cockroaches that are carrying disease. But the super-insect evolves into a giant monster that can assume human form. And in Blade, vampires hack their own genome to create near-invincible creatures. Upcoming projects: Del Toro is filming Hellboy 2. He's also working on 3993, a ghost story about the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and At The Mountains Of Madness, an HP Lovecraft adaptation set in Antarctica.

• Charlie Kaufman has only been a writer up to now. But he's managed to create a more consistent vision in his films than most directors. Films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovitch have a shared set of surreal concerns: characters journey into someone's head and discover, to your horror, that identity is always a first draft. Kaufman's characters are always revising their personal narratives and confronting different versions of themselves, like Kaufman and his twin in Adaptation. It's also worth hunting down the little-known Human Nature (directed by Eternal Sunshine's Michel Gondry) in which a mad scientist tries to train a mouse to use a salad fork. Upcoming project: Kaufman's directing his first film, Synecdoche, New York, due out next year. (It's about a director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and his cast, creating ever-stranger New York stories inside a theater which is a scale model of New York.)
• Kathryn Bigelow. Her best-known science fiction film is 1995's Strange Days, about a former cop who sells bootlegs of people's memories on data discs. And then one of those discs turns out to contain someone's memories of murdering a prostitute. But Bigelow's CV is full of claustrophobic thrillers with weird touches, from 1987's vampire romp Near Dark and 1990's cop drama Point Blank to 2002's K19: The Widowmaker. As with Boyle, even her real-world stories are so unnerving they feel like alternate reality. Upcoming project: Her next film is an Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.