Loved The Boroughs? 7 Sci-Fi Movies You Need to Watch Next

Netflix is back mining that warm-and-creepy vein it struck with Stranger Things, and this time it is not just borrowing the vibe — it is bringing the Duffers along for the ride. The Boroughs is the platform's clearest spiritual cousin to Stranger Things yet, and it swaps bikes and middle school for golf carts and grandkids in a way that actually works.

What The Boroughs is doing (and who's doing it)

The show is set in a postcard-ready retirement community in New Mexico where something not-from-here starts targeting elderly residents, literally siphoning away the time they have left. Alfred Molina leads the cast as a widower who refuses to fade quietly and ends up forming a makeshift monster-hunting squad with fellow seniors played by Alfre Woodard, Geena Davis, Clarke Peters, Denis O'Hare, and Bill Pullman. Tonally, it threads cosmic horror through that cozy, suburban wonder we all associate with old-school weekend matinees, but the coming-of-age angst gets traded for bigger questions about aging and legacy.

Behind the camera: the Duffer Brothers are producing, while Jeffrey Addiss and Will Matthews — the team behind The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance — created the series. If you are thinking this all sounds very Amblin, you are not wrong. The show assembles an underestimated neighborhood crew and points them at something impossible, Spielberg-style. And yes, all eight episodes are out now.

Context-wise, Netflix has been chasing the Stranger Things formula for years (hello, Locke & Key and Wednesday ), but The Boroughs is the first one that feels built from the same blueprint on purpose.

Already finished The Boroughs? Queue these next

• The World's End (Focus Features) — Edgar Wright closes the Cornetto Trilogy by dragging Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and their usual partners-in-chaos through a 12-pub crawl that turns into an alien takeover. Pegg's Gary King, a man stuck in his teenage glory days, reunites estranged friends to finish the crawl they botched 20 years earlier, only to find their hometown quietly swapped out by eerily perfect replicas controlled by a faceless cosmic authority. It is rowdy on the surface and quietly about nostalgia, addiction, and the particular weight of middle age.
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Columbia Pictures) — Before E.T., Spielberg redefined flying saucers with this suburban epic. Richard Dreyfuss plays Roy Neary, a power company worker in Indiana whose life implodes after a nighttime encounter with strange lights leaves him obsessed with a mountain he has never seen. His unraveling collides with Jillian (Melinda Dillon), a single mom whose child is taken by the unseen visitors, and Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), a French scientist trying to make contact. The film blends everyday domestic messiness with awe, leaning on a simple five-note musical motif from John Williams and Vilmos Zsigmond's luminous photography to toggle between paranoia and wonder.
• Jules (Bleecker Street) — Marc Turtletaub's gentle sci-fi comedy centers on Milton Robinson (Ben Kingsley), a small-town retiree whose routine is upended when a saucer crashes in his backyard and a blue-eyed alien quietly needs a place to crash. Two fellow septuagenarians, Sandy (Harriet Sansom Harris) and Joyce (Jane Curtin), stumble into the secret and help keep government goons at bay. Looking after this nearly silent visitor gives them a spark they thought was gone. The movie treats the alien as a stand-in for loneliness, finding something sincere to say about being seen when the world stops noticing you.
• Super 8 (Paramount Pictures) — J.J. Abrams does a loving riff on Spielberg with a 1979 Ohio story about kids making a zombie movie who witness a catastrophic train derailment that looses a creature on their town. Dogs disappear, the military shows up, and a bunch of middle-schoolers roll toward the truth with bicycles, a Super 8 camera, and questionable pyrotechnics. Under the spectacle, it is about grief and first love, and it remembers that the monster only matters if the small human moments land.
• batteries not included (Universal Pictures) — Matthew Robbins expanded an Amazing Stories idea into a feature about gentrification and stubborn hope. In a crumbling East Village building, diner owner Frank Riley (Hume Cronyn) and his wife Faye (Jessica Tandy), who is living with dementia, refuse to sell out to a ruthless developer. When help feels impossible, tiny metallic saucers arrive and start fixing things — literally and figuratively. The 1987 film sidesteps alien-as-threat and focuses on older people fighting to protect their community and their legacy, which makes it a surprisingly perfect match with The Boroughs.
• Cocoon (20th Century Studios) — Ron Howard 's crowd-pleaser follows Art Selwyn (Don Ameche), Ben Luckett (Wilford Brimley), and Joe Finley (Hume Cronyn), three Florida retirees sneaking into a pool that turns out to be supercharged by alien tech. The more they swim, the younger they feel: aches vanish, eyesight sharpens, and a hunger for life comes roaring back. It respects its characters instead of making their age a punchline, and uses its premise to ask what you would give up for one more healthy stretch with the people you love — including the cost of choosing the right thing.
• E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Universal Pictures) — The suburban sci-fi template, full stop. Elliott (Henry Thomas), still raw from his parents' split, finds a stranded alien in his shed. He and his siblings hide their new friend from government agents and help him phone home, and somewhere between the BMX chases and the starry-night finger touches, Spielberg bakes in a belief that extraordinary adventures can happen on the quietest cul-de-sac. It is foundational for a reason.