With no Harry Potter, Star Wars, or Lord of the Rings to carry the day, we have to settle for Tideland, Lady in the Water, Children of Men, The Fountain, Underworld: Evolution as the top five best-reviewed movies in the Sci-Fi genre. Sadly, with the exception of one, all of them is Rotten. If you can guess which one that is, you'll have our Golden Tomato winner for the best-reviewed Sci-Fi movie of 2006.

A medicre sequel to a so-so original, Underworld:Evolution again found Kate Beckinsale as a fearless werewolf killer in skintight clothing, navigating the complexities of an age-old war and an incredibly convoluted plot. The film wasn't screened for critics before it hit theaters, and the critical response ran the gamut from tepid ("A monster chiller sequel that is visually spectacular but rather overburdened with story," wrote David Hiltbrand of the Philadelphia Inquirer) to outright disparaging (Ben Kenigsberg of the Village Voice raved,"There's no guiding power at work here; it's Evolution without a shred of intelligent design.")

This was not the best year for M. Night Shyamalan. The auteur behind such creative and commercial successes as The Sixth Sense and Signs was critically drubbed for Lady in the Water, a fairy tale about a mythical being living beneath the swimming pool of a suburban Philadelphia apartment complex. While most critics were not taken with the director's vision ("Shyamalan's most alienating and self-absorbed project to date," wrote Entertainment Weeky), others were a bit more charitable ("Its strange, entrancing, mystical and sometimes frightening events occur in everyday surroundings and elevate the lives of deserving, everyday people," whote the Rochester Democrat-Gazette's Jack Garner.)

Terry Gilliam is a director whose grand visions have often run afoul with Hollywood, and his latest, Tideland, was no exception. A very, very dark comedy loosely based upon Alice in Wonderland, the film rubbed a lot of critics the wrong way with its disturbing subject matter and stylistic daring (John P. McCarthy of Boxoffice Magazine: "Appropriately, Tideland ends with a train wreck." Eric Lurio of the Greenwich Village Gazette: "A cinematic suicide note.") Still, some critics see Tideland, like many of Gilliam's films, as a future cult fave ("Honest, unflinching and worthy of reappraisal, wrote Jeff Shannon of the Seattle Times).

One of the year's most divisive pictures was Darren Aronofsky's meditative The Fountain. This time-jumping rumination on death and transcendence provoked a lot of mixed emotions from the pundits ("Exquisitely beautiful and almost unbearably sad... The Fountain is cinema as poetry; romance as revelation; science fiction as prayer," wrote Amy Biancolli of the Houston Chronicle; "Part historical fantasy, part lovers-separated-by-death weeper, part New Age fever dream, The Fountain isn't truly horrible, just very, very silly," wrote Stephanie Zacharek of Salon). Still, the movie isn't short on thought provoking ideas; as Robert Butler of the Kansas City Star noted, "I can't stop thinking about it, a good indication that this beautiful, frustrating film is tapping into something I can't put my finger on."

And the winner for the best sci-fi film goes to ... Children of Men.

Starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore, Children of Men is about a dystopian future in which women are no longer able to give birth and humanity is threatened with extinction. This taut and thought-provoking tale may not have the special effects normally found in movies of this genre, but you won't care one bit after the story kicks in. "Alfonso Cuarón's dense, dark, and layered meditation on fertility, technology, immigration, war, love, and life itself may be the movie of the still-young millennium," raves Dana Stevens of Slate. Children of Men is cream of the 2006 Sci-Fi crop, with an adjusted score of 82.79 and a Tomatometer of 93 percent.