Collider published a rundown this week arguing that the best hard science fiction films aren't the ones that explain the most, they're the ones that explain the least while getting away with it. Ten titles made the list. Five of them are worth talking about because they're doing very different things with the same trick.

Start with Ex Machina, because it's the newest and the one people still argue about at dinner parties. Alex Garland's film, according to Collider, subverts the Turing Test by letting the audience and Caleb know Ava is a machine from the very start. That's the whole game. Nathan Bateman isn't testing whether Ava can think, he's testing whether Caleb can be manipulated into believing she feels something. Four characters, one house, and the film never wastes a scene proving it. It's less about robots than about power, which is probably why it's aged better than most 2015 releases about artificial intelligence.

Then there's the granddaddy of the genre. 2001: A Space Odyssey is 57 years old and still gets cited as the reference point for how space should sound, or rather not sound, on screen. Kubrick brought in Arthur C. Clarke to make sure the orbital mechanics held up, and the payoff is a film where silence does more work than dialogue. HAL 9000 remains the template every AI-gone-wrong story since has been quietly ripping off.

Carl Sagan's Contact takes the opposite approach. Ellie Arroway, played by Jodie Foster, is a scientist who wants hard proof of everything, and the film sends her on a journey where she has none. Collider frames this as the film's central irony, and it's a good one. Matthew McConaughey's Palmer Joss argues for belief without evidence, and the script, credited to James V. Hart and Michael Goldenberg, never picks a winner. It just lets the tension sit there.

Children of Men gets less credit as a science fiction film because it doesn't feel like one, no spaceships, no robots, just a world where nobody can have children anymore. Alfonso Cuarón's 2027-set thriller had five credited writers working off P.D. James' novel, and the result leans on visual storytelling over exposition. It's arguably the bleakest entry on the list and also the one that's held up the most uncomfortably well.

Gattaca closes out the group, built by Andrew Niccol around a society sorted by genetics rather than merit. Collider's description of it cuts short in the material available, but the premise alone explains why it keeps getting cited whenever DNA testing or embryo selection makes headlines.

What ties these five together isn't the science, it's restraint. None of them stop to lecture. They trust the audience to catch up, which is presumably why a 1968 film and a 2014 one are still being mentioned in the same breath. Whether the remaining five titles on Collider's list hold to that same standard is worth checking once the full rundown is out.