At its best, science fiction can present a captivating, inventive picture of societal trends and flaws.

The Metacritic data we compiled here to track the most critically acclaimed sci-fi movies of all time traces a lineage of great films from Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" through the Tom Cruise-led "Minority Report" and Spike Jonze's "Her."

The resulting list includes all of the highest-rated movies that feature a "sci-fi" tag on the site, which turned out to be a wide-ranging categorization.

Here are the 100 best science fiction movies of all time, according to critics: