Science Fiction Part 8 – The Failures
The final tier of the science fiction ranking, including the negatives. Scott, Nolan, Zemeckis and Cameron, plus the most expensive failures the genre has produced.
Ranked lists of the best films and television ever made, argued one category at a time. Hundreds of titles, sorted by what actually holds up on the screen.
Each list takes on one category and ranks it without hedging. The greatest science fiction, the greatest heist films, the villains you remember long after the credits, the endings that landed and the ones that blew it. The categories are narrow on purpose. The verdicts are not.
No single film tops every list, and that is the point. Read enough of these rankings side by side and the patterns start to show, the choices that separate a masterpiece from a merely good movie come into focus, and the films worth your time rise to the top. Browse the collection below, see where your favorites landed, and find out which ones you have been missing.

The final tier of the science fiction ranking, including the negatives. Scott, Nolan, Zemeckis and Cameron, plus the most expensive failures the genre has produced.

The seventh tier of the science fiction ranking. Kubrick, Spielberg, Nolan and Niccol, plus the films whose best idea arrived and was never used again.

The sixth tier of the science fiction ranking. Cronenberg, Garland, Wise and Frakes, plus the television that earned its place.

The ninth and final tier of the horror ranking. What went wrong, and what each failure teaches about structure, character and nerve.

The eighth tier of the horror ranking. The Hammer and seventies vampire cycle, plus the films that took the premise somewhere domestic.

The seventh tier of the horror ranking. Carpenter, Fulci, Romero and Wan, plus the vampire films that treated hunting as a trade.

The sixth tier of the horror ranking. Park, Glazer, Kent, Eggers and Wan, plus the vampire films that rebuilt the rules from scratch.

The fifth tier of the horror ranking. Cameron, Romero, Miike, Coppola and Carpenter, plus the vampire cycle of the late eighties.

The fourth tier of the horror ranking. Scott, Bigelow, Bava, Landis and Raimi, plus the Universal and Hammer pictures that set the conventions.

The third tier of the horror ranking. Craven, Peele, Eggers, Aster and Wright, plus the found-footage and folk horror that reset the form.

The second tier of the horror ranking. Romero, Polanski, Friedkin, Carpenter and Kubrick, plus the films that invented the conventions everything since has used.

The bottom of the crime ranking. The adaptations that softened their source, the exploitation cycle at its least defensible, and the films that needed somebody to say no.
The best films work because their craft holds up, and that same eye goes into every book Richard Lowe writes. He has authored 113+ books and ghostwritten 54+ more across fiction, memoir, and nonfiction. If you want a book that respects the reader the way these films respect the viewer, start with a conversation.
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