The closest films to Interstellar pair real scientific scale with a personal loss the science is really about. Start with Arrival for grief structured as a puzzle, Contact for the case that wonder and rigour belong together, and 2001 for the sequence Nolan is openly answering. Tell TasteRay which half you want more of.
Interstellar gets shelved as a space movie, which undersells what makes it work. The wormhole, the tidal wave, the docking sequence: all of it is scaffolding for a man watching his daughter age on a screen while he cannot get back to her. Take the physics away and you still have that. Take that away and you have a very expensive documentary.
So the films below are not simply other movies with spacecraft in them. Each one runs the same trade: a genuinely large idea, held together by one person's private loss. Some lean harder on the science than Nolan does. Some barely leave Earth.
What makes a good Interstellar-like
A good Interstellar-like needs three things at once. It has to take its science seriously enough that you trust it, which rules out most space opera. It has to be built around a relationship the plot cannot solve, which rules out most disaster films. And it has to be willing to end on ambiguity rather than a rescue. That combination is rarer than the genre suggests.
8 movies and TV series like Interstellar (2014)
Sources and further reading
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FAQs about Movies Like Interstellar
Which of these is closest to Interstellar tonally?
Arrival, by a clear margin. Villeneuve builds the same structure: a scientific mystery that turns out to be a story about a parent and a child, with the reveal reframing everything before it. It is quieter and shorter, and it trades the spectacle for precision, but the emotional mechanism is nearly identical.
Is 2001 worth it if I found Interstellar slow?
Probably not first. Kubrick is considerably more patient than Nolan and far less interested in explaining himself, so if the docking sequence felt long you will struggle with the twenty minutes before it. Try Contact or The Martian instead, then come back to 2001 once the appetite is there.
Do any of these hold up on the actual physics?
The Martian is the most rigorous, and its author corrected the orbital mechanics himself between drafts. Interstellar had Kip Thorne on set, which is why the black hole looks the way it does. Contact is sound on radio astronomy and vague on the transport. Sunshine abandons plausibility in its final act.