11 Best Movies About Artificial Intelligence, Ranked

Somewhere between science fiction and prophecy, artificial intelligence has become the defining fantasy and fear of our present moment. It’s in our phones, our homes, our headlines. We argue about it, we dismiss it, we design around it, and we endlessly wonder about it. What if it goes rogue? What if it becomes human? What if it doesn’t want to be?

Cinema, of course, got there first. Long before ChatGPT or Boston Dynamics, movies were already building futures out of code and questions. With this in mind, this list looks at some of the films that explore AI best. These titles capture our evolving relationship with machines that think; some with awe, others with dread, and many with a mix of both.

11

‘I, Robot’ (2004)

Directed by Alex Proyas

“You are experiencing a car accident.” Set in a not-so-distant future where humanoid robots have become part of everyday life, I, Robot centers on Detective Del Spooner (Will Smith), a man who doesn’t trust machines. Smith handles the part with charisma and edge. He’s believable as a skeptic in a world that’s too comfortable with automation. Spooner’s paranoia seems excessive until a prominent scientist turns up dead. The key suspect? A robot (Alan Tudyk through motion capture) who may have developed a mind of its own.

The film moves like a summer blockbuster—chases, explosions, sleek visual effects—but there’s something heavier underneath. It’s not just about one rogue robot; it’s about what happens when the systems we rely on begin to think for themselves. Inspired (very loosely) by the ideas of Isaac Asimov, I, Robot flirts with real philosophical questions: Can a machine have a soul? What is morality without empathy? The answers aren’t always subtle, but the tension still holds up.

I, Robot

Release Date

July 15, 2004

Runtime

115 Minutes

10

‘The Creator’ (2023)

Directed by Gareth Edwards

“She’s just a kid, man.” In the middle of a war between humans and artificial intelligence, a soldier named Joshua (John David Washington) is sent on a mission to destroy a powerful AI weapon. But when he arrives, he discovers that the weapon is a child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). What follows is a visual epic that blends a sci-fi fable with the rawness of war movies. In The Creator, director Gareth Edwards crafts a world that feels lived-in, dusty, and real, more like Children of Men than Star Wars.

Beneath the CGI, there’s a beating heart: a story about grief, memory, and the bond between a human and something almost human. In this regard, The Creator doesn’t reinvent the wheel, and it could have delved more deeply into its themes, but it uses familiar parts to build something haunting, beautiful, and tender. At its best, it asks whether love is something that must be born, or whether it can be made.

The Creator

Release Date

September 29, 2023

Runtime

123 minutes

9

‘Transcendence’ (2014)

Directed by Wally Pfister

“Once online, a sentient machine will quickly overcome the limits of biology.” Dr. Will Caster (Johnny Depp) is dying. But he’s also one of the world’s leading minds in artificial intelligence, and his wife and colleagues hatch a plan to upload his consciousness into a quantum computer. What they create isn’t exactly him… but it isn’t just a machine, either. From here, Transcendence expands into a messy, ambitious sci-fi epic that swings big and often misses, but its failures are fascinating.

The digital Will begins to heal disease, terraform land, manipulate matter—but at what cost? The film lurches between thriller and philosophical treatise, never fully finding its tone, but always chasing something bold. Fundamentally, it’s about the merging of flesh and code, the fear of omniscience, and the desperation to cling to those we’ve lost. In this sense, Transcendence is a rare mainstream movie that tackles the spiritual implications of AI head-on, and, for all its flaws, it lingers in the mind.

8

‘WarGames’ (1983)

Directed by John Badham

“Shall we play a game?” David Lightman (Matthew Broderick) is a bored teenager with a computer and too much time. When he accidentally hacks into what he thinks is a new game, he doesn’t realize he’s accessed a U.S. military AI that controls nuclear weapons. What starts as a prank becomes a potential apocalypse. It may sound simple, almost cartoonish, but WarGames is funny, tense, and smarter than it looks. It was also a box office smash.

Released in the early days of PCs, the movie was ahead of its time in warning about the dangers of automation without oversight. The AI in it isn’t evil; it just doesn’t understand context. That’s arguably the film’s strongest element. The threat isn’t from a killer robot or malicious intelligence, but from a system doing exactly what it was told to do, without knowing how to stop. Today, with algorithms running everything from elections to bank loans, its message feels unnervingly current.

Wargames

Release Date

June 3, 1983

Runtime

114 minutes

7

‘Terminator 2: Judgment Day’ (1991)

Directed by James Cameron

“I need your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle.” James Cameron‘s 1984 The Terminator was a sensation in its own right, a sleeper box-office success that blended great action with heady sc-fi, all while launching the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cameron’s breakthrough presented compelling human drama at the forefront of an ominous premise: artificial intelligence rising, and wiping out humanity.

The 1991 sequel is generally regarded as bigger and better in pretty much every way. It’s also even more thoughtful. Schwarzenegger played the hero this time around, and the T-800’s coming-to-terms with the value of human life may sound corny on paper—but it’s splendidly effective and touching. It’s a key example of Cameron’s singular gift for exploiting primal human emotions against envelope-pushing cinema spectacle.

6

‘Ex Machina’ (2015)

Directed by Alex Garland

“Is it strange to have made something that hates you?” Ex Machina is AI speculation at its coldest, most minimalist, and most psychologically claustrophobic. In Alex Garland‘s directorial debut, a coder (Domhnall Gleeson) wins a mysterious company contest and is flown to a remote facility to participate in a Turing test. The subject? Ava (Alicia Vikander at her most eerily posed), a lifelike AI in a glass cell. But from the first interaction, it’s clear that this isn’t a test, but a trap.

The experiment becomes a power struggle, one where the boundaries between creation and creator blur beyond repair. Every word feels loaded, every gesture calculated. Garland’s script is razor-sharp (he’s one of cinema’s best sci-fi writers at the moment), and the tension simmers until it boils over in a quiet, devastating climax. More than just a warning, Ex Machina is a parable about control, desire, and the illusion of knowing what we’ve built. Ava isn’t a monster. She’s a mirror, and that might be scarier.

Ex Machina

Release Date

April 10, 2015

Runtime

108 minutes

5

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

Directed by Stanley Kubrick

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.” Spanning eons and galaxies, 2001 is less a film than a cinematic monolith. The AI at the center of it all, HAL 9000 (voiced by Douglas Rain), is an unblinking red eye aboard a spaceship bound for Jupiter. HAL is helpful. HAL is calm. HAL starts killing the crew. Why? That’s the wrong question, and Kubrick doesn’t offer simple answers. HAL’s malfunction isn’t emotional: it’s logical, terrifyingly so.

Once again, the real horror isn’t that HAL disobeys, but that he obeys too well, interpreting his directives with inhuman precision. He’s an extreme version of the cautionary ‘paperclip maximizer’ thought experiment. As the human crew fights for survival, the film drifts into abstraction—a psychedelic spiral into evolution and alien intelligence. It’s cold, yes, but not without wonder. No movie has ever captured the awe and fear of intelligent design, ours or otherwise, quite like this. Visionary, vast, and profound.

4

‘The Matrix’ (1999)

Directed by the Wachowskis

“There is no spoon.” The Matrix is probably the best fusion of legitimately thoughtful sci-fi speculation with blockbuster appeal. Thomas Anderson (Keanu Reeves) is a hacker. Or a drone. Or a messiah. He’s also not real, because nothing is. The world he knows is a simulation built by intelligent machines to pacify and harvest humanity. Once he wakes up, he becomes Neo, and action cinema changes forever.

The Matrix is pure myth wrapped in leather and philosophy. Practically every frame is now iconic. So many of its concepts—simulation theory, red pills, coded reality—have seeped into the cultural lexicon. But beneath the kung-fu and bullet time is something deeply unsettling: a world run by algorithms, where control isn’t enforced but assumed. The machines don’t need to kill us. They just need to distract us. In many ways, they already are. Looking at the discord currently wrought by social media algorithms, one can’t help but think that The Matrix isn’t just dystopia, but prophecy with sunglasses on.

The Matrix

Release Date

March 31, 1999

Runtime

136 minutes

3

‘A.I. Artificial Intelligence’ (2001)

Directed by Steven Spielberg

“I’m sorry I broke your heart.” Speaking of blockbuster entertainment, in the early 2000s, Steven Spielberg managed to turn machines with emotions into box office gold. In A.I., David (Haley Joel Osment) is a robot boy who loves his mother (Frances O’Connor). That’s what he’s programmed to do. But when he’s abandoned, he sets out to become “real” so that she’ll love him back. What follows is one of the strangest, most ambitious films of Spielberg’s career—a spiritual heir to Pinocchio filtered through Kubrick’s icy detachment.

There’s so much at play here: domestic drama, dystopian horror, fairy-tale surrealism, and finally, quiet apocalypse. David is the eye of the storm. He’s innocent, but that innocence makes everything worse. He clings, he searches, he begs for meaning in a world that doesn’t owe him any. It’s a devastating performance by Osment, and the film’s tone is one of awe curdled by despair. The ending (controversial, perhaps misunderstood) isn’t a happy one, but it’s arguably an honest one.

2

‘Her’ (2013)

Directed by Spike Jonze

“I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you.” Joaquin Phoenix turns in a wonderfully poignant performance in this one as Theodore. He’s lonely, bruised, and living in a pastel-tinted future just close enough to feel real. When he installs a new operating system, he meets Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). She’s a voice, a presence, a consciousness that begins to change his life. She learns. She laughs. She loves. And then… she grows.

Her is a love story, but it’s also a meditation on intimacy, isolation, and the strange ways we connect when the physical world no longer satisfies. It asks profound questions around whether love requires a body, or just the capacity to listen. It’s the perfect sci-fi for the early social media age, a time of instant communication but surging loneliness. Her has already revealed itself to be one of the most prophetic movies of the 2010s and its reputation is only likely to grow in the coming years.

Her

Release Date

December 18, 2013

Runtime

126 Minutes