Streaming tips

Notable recent sci-fi

Plan 75

Imagine a Japan that has incentivized everyone over 74 to voluntarily end their lives. This quietly devastating dystopian drama from a first-time Japanese director does just that, focusing on the connections that form between voluntary enrollees and the program’s young staffers. $5 on demand

Jules

Ben Kingsley is endearing in this comic fable about a lonely widower who takes in an alien named Jules who has crashlanded in rural Pennsylvania. Everyone attributes the story to creeping dementia, except for two friendly neighbors played by Jane Curtin and Harriet Sansom Harris. Showtime

The Creator

In this big, visually dazzling, but inescapably absurd 2023 sci-fi thriller, John David Washington plays a rogue ex-soldier who refuses to advance America’s global war against AI when he meets the adorable robot girl he’s been told should be treated as New Asia’s most dangerous weapon. Hulu

Aporia

Months after her husband dies in a road accident, a widow is given the chance to erase the guilty driver as well as her loss with the help of a rudimentary time machine. The premise is a stretch, but there are rewards in seeing Judy Greer try to make the dilemma emotionally resonant. Hulu

The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future

Sci-fi blends with eco-mysticism in this 2023 Chilean film about a long-deceased woman who returns from the dead, wholly unaged, when she rises from a polluted river crowded with dead fish. $5 on demand

If You Were the Last

Anthony Mackie and Zoë Chao co-star in a mildly amusing rom-com about two cast-adrift astronauts openly mulling a dilemma: Should they hook up, since they and their spaceship will probably never get home? Peacock