Items22The creator’s order
  1. 1The Matrix (1999)The Matrix (1999) 8.7/10 on IMDbReleased Mar 31, 1999Start here if you want the rules of a virtual world explained through action. The city looks like the late 1990s to the people living in it. Once Neo sees it as software, fights and chases start turning on what the system can be made to do.0
  2. 2Ghost in the Shell (1995)Ghost in the Shell (1995) 7.9/10 on IMDbReleased Nov 18, 1995Choose the animated original if you want a networked world where someone can meddle with your memories. Major Kusanagi hunts the Puppet Master, but the hunt keeps raising a harder question about how a person could tell which thoughts were ever their own.0
  3. 3eXistenZ (1999)eXistenZ (1999) 6.8/10 on IMDbReleased Apr 14, 1999Try this if you want a video game that feels bodily and strange. Players plug living game pods into a port in the spine. As the designer and her companion try her new game, peculiar lines of dialogue and unexpected impulses make it harder to tell who is deciding what they do.0
  4. 4The Thirteenth Floor (1999)The Thirteenth Floor (1999) 7.0/10 on IMDbReleased Apr 16, 1999Put this on for a murder mystery with two places to investigate. A programmer enters a simulation of 1937 Los Angeles, where the people carry on with lives that feel real to them. Pay attention to how the detective work changes once a person in one world can wear someone else's face in another.0
  5. 5Nirvana (1997)Nirvana (1997) 6.1/10 on IMDbReleased Jan 24, 1997Pick this Italian cyberpunk movie to see what it looks like when a video game character wants out of the loop. Solo knows he's trapped repeating the scenarios someone wrote for him. He asks his creator to erase the game, setting up a programmer's search for a way to give his own character a choice.0
  6. 6Johnny Mnemonic (1995)Johnny Mnemonic (1995) 5.6/10 on IMDbReleased May 26, 1995Pick this if you want a scrappy chase movie where a man's memory is a storage device. Johnny carries corporate data inside his head and can only hold it for so long. The race to get it out makes the cost of being permanently useful to the network painfully physical.0
  7. 7The Lawnmower Man (1992)The Lawnmower Man (1992) 5.5/10 on IMDbReleased Mar 5, 1992Watch for the early computer graphics and a virtual reality experiment that keeps exceeding the lab's control. Jobe becomes more powerful as he learns inside the system. His new abilities turn an experiment meant to change one person into a question of whether the world outside can keep him out.0
  8. 8Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996)Lawnmower Man 2: Beyond Cyberspace (1996) 2.6/10 on IMDbReleased Jan 12, 1996Choose this sequel when you want the first movie's wilder idea in full view. Jobe aims to bring people into a network he can control, while a young hacker can reach places inside it that the adults can't. It's a pulpy take on who gets to own a shared digital world.0
  9. 9Mindwarp (1992)Mindwarp (1992) 5.2/10 on IMDbReleased May 25, 1992Inworld gives its residents a life they can dream into existence. Judy asks to see what’s outside and gets a wasteland instead. Pick this for a grimy bit of early-’90s science fiction where a life spent plugged in can look appealing once you see what people are hiding from.0
  10. 10Virtuosity (1995)Virtuosity (1995) 5.5/10 on IMDbReleased Aug 4, 1995Try this for an action movie about a person who begins as a piece of software. A virtual killer built for police training gets loose in a physical body. The cop tracking him has to deal with a program that still treats a city full of people like a game.0