Christopher Nolan is widely known as a student of film and cinema. His movies are full of references and influences from earlier works, and his latest, Interstellar, is no exception. Watching the epic space adventure slash family drama unfold, you can’t help but notice nods to the work of other filmmakers. While there is obvious inspiration taken from films like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, there are many more that you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Just for the hell of it, we’ve compiled a handful of classic black and white films (and one that is, admittedly, cheating) whose presence can be felt, to varying degrees, in Nolan’s latest offering.

The argument over the greatest science fiction movie of all time is a constant, heated debate among genre fans. There are always a few staples, including the likes of Star Wars, The Matrix, and War of the Worlds. Recently, the Discovery Channel’s DNews YouTube Channel explored some of the cinematic options in one of their latest videos, arriving on a top five. The results might just surprise you.

Host Anthony Carboni sat down with filmmaker and Film Riot host, Ryan Connolly, to talk about their top sci-fi movies. While the discussion was purely anecdotal, Carboni injected how the films link to real world situations and technology. The conversation, not only circled around the movies that form the core of the genre, but also how science fiction influenced hard science and the real world.

When you take look at Hollywood blockbusters of today, there isn’t a huge amount of range separating one film from the next. Something like The Dark Knight Rises looks completely different from The Avengers due to a much grittier atmosphere and lack of pronounced CGI effects, but they’re still in effect action movies with huge set pieces built around escalating conflict. Explosions here, explosions there. Or if superhero movies are a lame comparison to you, just compare Battleship and a .gif of someone spitting into a cup full of diarrhea. But turn the clock back 85 years, when the scene was a lot less dominated by all things epic, and you’ll find Fritz Lang sitting atop his mountain of talent, clearly ahead of his time even now, when film inflation is taken into account.

His 1927 film Metropolis is celebrated for many things, such as being one of the first major science fiction classics. While not seen in quite as favorable a light at the time of its release, the story of class differences only seems to become more relevant with time, as the metaphorical 1% distance themselves from the rest of us. This article itself is a microcosm of that struggle, as I sit here earning a few bucks to write a story about Ralph DeLuca, a man who dropped over a million dollars for a set of nine rare movie posters. The posters were being auctioned off by California collector Kenneth Schachter, who went bankrupt after not being able to pay back loans used to buy film memorabilia, which is a problem I will never have.