1. THE WAGES OF FEAR (1953)
Henri-Georges Clouzot's volatile thriller is the definition of a white-knuckle ride, the film's extended suspense sequences among the best in cinematic history. The film sees four desperate men who are stranded in a Latin American backwater sign up on a suicidal mission to drive two truckloads of nitro-glycerine 300 miles down hazardous jungle roads, in a bid to quell an oil fire. With their dangerous cargo, they could be blown to pieces at any instant, and in the film's most famous scene they turn their trucks around on a rickety timber platform high above a mountain gorge. It's explosive stuff!

2. 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968)
Boyle has clearly noted that the genius of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey is not how much the director does, but how little. Kubrick's film reduces each scene to an essence, proving one of the first sci-fi films concerned not with thrilling us, but with inspiring our awe. It is remembered best for its stunning visuals, allied with beautiful music, and for its metaphysical yearnings, noting that that we live not on a planet but among the stars.

3. SOLARIS (1972)
Often cited as Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky's reply to Kubrick's 2001, the film is, in fact, based on a 1961 novel by the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Like 2001 it does involve human space journeys and encounters with a transforming alien intelligence, which creates places (in 2001) or people (in Solaris) from clues drawn by reading minds. But while Kubrick's mind-stretching movie is outward looking, charting man's next step in the universe, Tarkovsky's metaphysical piece is inward, probing the nature and reality of the human persona.

4. ALIEN (1979)
Just as sci-fi was settling into the warm and fuzzy world of Star Wars and its shining light-sabre of hope, Ridley Scott conjured a vicious antidote, a raw, visceral interstellar scream that dragged the genre deep into the universe of horror. The film's greatest strength � besides the creature itself � is the pacing; Scott takes his time (as, of course, does Boyle). And just as Scott waits, so the Alien waits. After all, it's not hacking and slashing that we enjoy; it's the waiting. And, as we know, sci-fi films sometimes bring bad things to those who wait.

5. DAS BOOT (1981)
Wolfgang Petersen's submarine epic is claustrophobic in the extreme, a theme it lends to Sunshine, although this is not what the film is about; the crew of the WWII German U-Boat has come to terms with that unpleasantness already. Rather, the film about the desperate, dangerous and terrifying job of manning a submarine, which is rather difficult, like, one imagines, manning a spaceship. Boyle's fine use of sound, too, mirrors Petersen's masterful employment. During combat, the boat rocks with explosions and reverberates with cries, while during the chases, the sonar pings off the U-boat's hull. When the boat dives too deep, rivets pop out and fire like bullets across the cramped enclosures.

6. THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)
The fact-based telling of NASA's first manned space launch, this large ensemble announced the careers of a number of players, including the otherwise little know foursome of Ed Harris, Scott Glenn, Fred Ward and Dennis Quaid. As with Alex Garland standing in the shadow of Sunshine, it also confirmed the strong screen presence of playwright Sam Shepard, and stands alongside the likes of Nashville, The Godfather and Apocalypse Now as a movie that boasts an ambitious reach � spending heavily on lavish locations and special effects, while also considering moment as intently as does an art-house film. The movie also suggests that true human heroes are team players.

7. FOR ALL MANKIND (1989)
This definitive documentary charting the Apollo missions comes from Al Reinert, who watched all the footage shot during the missions -over six million feet in all, and picked out the best. Instead of being a newsy, fact-filled documentary, Reinart's piece focuses on the human aspects of the space flights; the only voices heard in the film are the voices of the astronauts and mission control. Reinart uses the astronauts' own interviews and the sound files from the mission footage. The score by Brian Eno adds a peculiarity to events that the Apollo pilots were privileged to experience 'for all mankind'.

8. Space (2001)
Space is a visually impressive six-part popular science series from the BBC that follows their Walking with Dinosaurs and The Planets into the realm of computer animation. Jurassic Park's Sam Neill (no stranger to acting alongside CGI effects) is our earthbound anchor in a show that, much like Carl Sagan's pioneering Cosmos from 1980, delves in to the mysteries of how stars and planets were created, explaining the science in layman's terms, terms that Boyle and his crew could easily understand. Unlike Sagan's visionary and optimistic Cosmos, however, Space shows with terrifying clarity how fortunate we are to exist at all, and how it could all end at any moment. And that's something Boyle is keen to illuminate with Sunshine.