+1 for Brit Marling. The East was "smart" too but not sci fi.

Some that i like and remember on top of my head:

Cargo (2009) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0381940/

The Abyss (1989) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0096754/

Children of Men (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/

Serenity (2005) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379786/

Impostor (2001) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0160399/

Screamers (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/

K-PAX (2001) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0272152/

The Last Starfighter (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087597/

Twelve Monkeys (1995) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/

Dune (1984) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0087182/

Equilibrium (2002) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0238380/

Silent Running (1972) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067756/

Mission to Mars (2000) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0183523/

Outland (1981) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/

Galaxy Quest (1999) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/

Life (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5442430/

Passengers (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1355644/

Enjoy!

Does Being John Malkovich count as sci fi? It was pretty mind bendy, but I'm not sure that was due to the sci-finess...

came here to recommend this movie, specifically. excellent choice.

do be aware that this is a VERY slow burn, that there isn't a scenery change and it's literally a conversation between six [i believe?] people. but it's a great, great little movie that does so much with so little.
about time is exquisitely gentle and worth watching. and bill nighy is wonderful in it.

her is fantastic.

i wish we made more sort of gentle science fiction like that.

these are all great picks. and i want to echo your sentiment about dark city.

absolutely worth watching.
these are both great, too. especially silent running.

since i've gone through the thread and commented on some of the stuff that's already here, allow me to add a couple more that i have genuinely enjoyed:

logan's run is "dystopia from another angle." in it, people aren't allowed to live past a certain age. the movie concerns "runners" - people who try and get away from dying at that age and how that works out for them. it's kind of dated, now, but you'll get to see practical effects in a way they're not used anymore. great, understated bit of science fiction:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074812/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

bicentennial man is a gentle story about a robot who lives...and lives...and lives and sees generations of people grow up under his care. it is very much a story about age and aging, but does the whole idea in such a wonderful manner that it's a crime it never got bigger than what it is. [but most people don't like this sort of gentle storytelling, alas.] plus, as an added bonus, robin williams is wonderful in this one. [side-note, "jack" is also fantastic. not science fiction at all, but heartbreaking and gentle all at the same time. robin williams was so very good when he was in serious movies.]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0182789/?ref_=nv_sr_1

finally, i'd like to also recommend "a scanner darkly." i'm not normally into keanu reeves, and while this movie is more about drugs and drug culture and less about science fiction, it has some science fiction elements to it. the bicycle scene will make you howl with laugther. the ending [and final monologue] will make you cry.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405296/?ref_=nv_sr_1

enjoy.

Good question! What Swedrami said: the movie contains elements of time travel and wormholes, so for me it's a sci-fi flick. I guess sci-fi means something different for different people. Take "The Man from Earth" as an example: that movie is shot inside a cabin in the woods, with no focus on technology or time travel, no spaceships, no action shots, no aliens,... just a handful of fellow university professors engaging in an intellectual game with their departing work colleague who claims to be a 14000-year old Magdalenian caveman. Yet, for me, I consider this movie to fall under science fiction too. ;)
I agree! ;)
None of my friends ever heard of Enemy Mine. Glad to see someone here who's heard of it. LOL ;)

Both are great. I love Moon. A very clever movie.

These aren't movies, but the original b&w
The Outer Limits and The Twilight Zone
had alot of episodes that made you think
afetr watching.

The modern re-makes were OK, but didn't
seem to quite capture what the old ones did.

I'll recommend these for leaning towards a "smart" genre of sci-fi.

In Time - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1637688/
Next - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0435705/
The Host - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1517260/

If you liked Criminal this one is similar (and came out first) but different enough to be worth a viewing
Self/less - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2140379/
Criminal - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3014866/

Oblivion - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1483013/
Pandorum - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1188729/

This one is sort of a smart sci-fi dramedy???
Lockout - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1592525/

Pandorum - maybe not very smart, some action and horror blended in, but a small group of misfits working together to take control of colony ship.
12 Monkeys - Got Bruce Willis and time travel. He tries to find the terrorist group behind biologic plague? in the past with help of a psychiatrist.

I could see where Pandorum was trying to go with the whole mystery aspect / memory loss etc, but agreed that it degenerated into a predictable horror / action film. By the time the plot twist was revealed, it wasn't interesting enough to care about. Oblivion struck me as a pretty mindless money-spinner. Some of the twist was obvious to me very early on.

Unfortunately, if you've seen enough scifi series, you've probably seen the entire range of themes that mainstream movies explore. Originality is a rarity.

I'm going to get hated for this, but Jurassic Park. There's alot of action, but there is philosophy as well. Kind of like The Elder Scrolls games: there's the braindead action for people who want it, with spoonfed storyline, but if you take the time to read the books in game, you find hidden messages in the plot. Not all movie filler is actually filler: sometimes those "boring scenes" are the original focus of the script, and the action that everyone praises is the filler.

EDIT: I haven't seen it, but i was told Starship Troopers was a pragmatic utopian sci-fi about humans fighting a war against communist bugs. There's alot of this talk about how it was supposedly a parody of fascism, but i watched a pretty good video explaining why that's not the case, and only the director of the movie actually felt that way, while the script writer and original author envisioned it as a utopian society, and the hidden comedy comes from the realism of how humans would act, such as how today we have cameras everywhere and such, in such a utopian society, it's not unrealistic to imagine realtime war footage on the news.


EDIT2: Another classic: The Day the Earth Stood Still. The remake is a global warming re-purposing of a movie about world peace. Much of what made the original good was completely lost in the remake.

Star Wars is another great example of a movie where the action is the filler, but you gotta be smart to pick up on what's going on. The Jedi are Order (not good) and the Sith are Chaos (not evil). While the sith are portrayed as evil the grand majority of the time, the story isn't really that simple, and the prequels easily show that the jedi have their own evil bits, too. I do consider Star Wars the bottom of the barrel in this regard, though. If you can get this concept in your head, games like KOTOR end up having plenty more redeemable value, especially when you run across characters that have a little of both in them.

The problem with Jurassic Park (and Starship Troopers as well) is that most of ideas and explainations are only in the books. You wouldn't understand what each film is about, unless you read the book.

i slept on it a bit and thought of another few i'd like to mention.

it was /huge/ in the 80's, but et, [the stephen spielberg] movie is not really about a /lot/ of action at all, instead, it focuses on the bond between elliott and the creature and how they learn from one another as they go.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083866/?ref_=ttls_li_tt

along this line, i'd also like to suggest "close encounters of the third kind." again. not really "action" so much as mystery about what's really going on. [i do, though, think that the "tone" that you hear throughout the movie is more unsettling and less gentle, but eh.]

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075860/?ref_=ttls_li_tt

"contact" starring jodie foster. there's only one real "action sequence" in the movie. the rest is an exploration of what it means to decipher alien languages and how we might be connected to those aliens, in turn. great, slow-burn, too.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118884/?ref_=ttls_li_tt

starman is a GREAT underrated movie about aliens and jeff bridges turns in a fantastic, gentle exploration of what it means to be truly human.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0088172/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

ditto for paul. paul's completely underrated and gentle and has a lot of quite wry humour as a throughline.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1092026/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1