Best alien movies, ranked

Search for the best alien movies and you get two different lists tangled together. One is the Alien franchise, all xenomorphs and chestbursters. The other is the wider world of films about contact with something not from here, which runs from a linguist decoding a squid language to a kid hiding an alien in his closet. This list is the second kind: the best movies about aliens, in all their forms, ranked. The Alien series gets its own note near the end.

And if you are here because one specific alien movie is rattling around your head with no title attached, a strange first-contact scene or a creature you cannot place, you can describe the plot you remember and get the name back fast. Now, the list.

The best alien movies, ranked

1. Arrival (2016)

Twelve ships appear over the Earth and a linguist, not a soldier, is sent to work out what they want. Denis Villeneuve turns first contact into a quiet, aching puzzle about language and time, and the reveal recontextualizes everything you have watched. It is the rare alien movie that makes you cry, and it tops most serious lists for good reason. Start here.

2. Alien (1979)

A haunted-house movie in deep space, and still the scariest thing on this list. The crew of a mining ship answers a distress call and brings something back, and Ridley Scott lets the dread build in long, quiet stretches before it strikes. H.R. Giger's creature has never been topped for sheer wrongness. The film that proved aliens could be pure horror.

3. The Thing (1982)

John Carpenter's masterpiece strands a research crew in Antarctica with a creature that can perfectly copy anyone, so nobody knows who is still human. The paranoia is as nasty as the practical effects, which still look revolting in the best way. Hated on release, now widely considered one of the greatest horror films ever made. Watch it cold and let it work on you.

4. Aliens (1986)

James Cameron takes the slow burn of the original and turns it into a war movie, with Ripley leading marines back to the nest. It is louder, faster, and more quotable, and it somehow stands shoulder to shoulder with Scott's film while doing the opposite thing. Proof a sequel can chase a different feeling and still be essential.

5. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)

The other side of the coin: an alien movie with a heart the size of a house. A lonely boy finds a stranded creature in the backyard and tries to get him home before the grown-ups close in. Spielberg made the friendly-visitor film everyone else still measures themselves against, the bike against the moon is burned into the culture, and it is still the first one to show a kid.

6. District 9 (2009)

Aliens land in Johannesburg and end up herded into a slum, and Neill Blomkamp uses the setup for one of the sharpest pieces of science-fiction allegory in years. It starts as a mockumentary and turns into a desperate chase, with a lead who is hard to like and impossible to look away from. Few films that year looked or felt anything like it.

7. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)

Before E.T., Spielberg made the definitive movie about the pull of the unknown, an ordinary man who sees a UFO and cannot let it go, building a mountain out of mashed potatoes while his life falls apart. It treats contact as awe rather than threat, the final meeting still gives people chills, and it set the template for wonder that this whole side of the genre still follows.

8. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

A cowardly officer dies on an alien battlefield, then wakes up to live the same day again, and again, getting a little sharper each time. It is a war movie crossed with a video game crossed with a comedy, and it is far better than its forgettable title suggests. Tom Cruise dying on a loop never stops being fun, and it holds up to as many rewatches as you want to give it.

9. Predator (1987)

A team of commandos in the jungle realizes something is hunting them, picking them off one by one, and the something is an alien trophy hunter with thermal vision and a shoulder cannon. It is half sweaty action movie and half monster movie, and it nails both, with a creature design good enough to carry five sequels and counting.

10. Nope (2022)

Jordan Peele reinvents the flying-saucer movie as a story about spectacle and the people who chase it, set on a struggling horse ranch under a very wrong sky. The less you know about what is actually up there, the better. It is funny and frightening at once, and the freshest big-swing alien movie in a decade, which is why people are still arguing about it.

11. Under the Skin (2013)

Scarlett Johansson plays something wearing a human shape, driving around Scotland luring men to a fate the film shows in cold, abstract images you will not shake. This is the art-house end of the genre, slow and strange and more interested in mood than plot. It is not for everyone, but the people it grabs never quite let go of it.

12. Annihilation (2018)

A team of scientists walks into the Shimmer, a growing zone where something has landed and started rewriting life itself, and what they find is beautiful and horrifying at once. Alex Garland trades invasion for something stranger and harder to name, and the final twenty minutes are like nothing else. For when you want science fiction that does not explain itself.

13. Independence Day (1996)

The big, dumb, glorious one. City-sized ships park over the world's capitals and blow them up, and humanity fights back with fighter jets and a rousing speech. It is the blockbuster that defined the alien-invasion movie for a generation, and it is still a blast on a Saturday night. Leave your brain at the door and have a great time.

Best alien invasion movies

If it is the full-scale invasion you want, ships in the sky and humanity on the back foot, start with these:

• Independence Day (1996). The genre's loud, crowd-pleasing high point.

• War of the Worlds (2005). Spielberg goes dark, an invasion seen from the ground as one father drags his kids to safety.

• Edge of Tomorrow (2014). A repeating invasion day that turns into the smartest action movie of its year.

• Attack the Block (2011). Aliens drop on a South London estate and the local teenagers fight back. Fast, funny, and an early John Boyega.

• Signs (2002). Shyamalan keeps the invasion at the edge of the frame and lets a quiet farm carry the fear.

Best alien horror movies

When you want the visitor to be a nightmare rather than a wonder, these are the scariest of the bunch:

• Alien (1979) and The Thing (1982), the two pillars of alien horror, both already near the top of this list.

• No One Will Save You (2023). A near-silent home invasion by grays, carried almost entirely by one terrified performance. A recent favorite for good reason.

• A Quiet Place (2018). Sound-hunting creatures force a family into silence. Technically more monster than martian, but it earns its place.

• Nope (2022). Proof the thing in the sky can still be genuinely scary when a director rethinks the rules.

Remember the creature but not the title? You can find a horror movie from a description in a couple of sentences.

Friendly aliens, and picks for younger viewers

Not every visitor wants to eat you. For wonder over terror, or for watching with kids, the gentle end of the genre is led by E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Both treat contact as something to marvel at. Arrival is the grown-up version of that same feeling, thoughtful rather than scary, and a good bridge once younger viewers want something with more weight.

What about the Alien franchise?

If you came looking for the Alien series specifically, the two originals earn their spots on merit: Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) are two of the best films in the whole genre. The series has grown a lot since, through Prometheus, Covenant, and the well-reviewed Alien: Romulus (2024). It has enough films now that the watch order is a question of its own, so we rank the whole series, and lay out where to start, in a dedicated guide to every Alien movie in order.

How to find an alien movie you can't remember

Sometimes you do not want a recommendation, you want one particular film back. A spinning craft over a small town, a creature copying a friend's face, a message no one could translate. When the scene is vivid but the title is gone, describe what you remember rather than guessing keywords. You can search by the plot you recall, and the more specific and odd the detail, the faster it lands. You can also browse the full list of movies about aliens to jog your memory, or hand a real puzzle to the crowd at r/tipofmytongue.

Where to watch them

Streaming homes move around constantly, so treat this as a starting point. Netflix tends to rotate a healthy mix of the bigger titles in and out, and recent films like Nope and No One Will Save You often land on the major subscription services within a year of release. The older classics drift between platforms and the free, ad-supported channels, so a quick where-to-watch check on a specific title is always worth doing before you commit your evening.