Masters of Temporal Cinema
Time travel is the genre’s most useful lie.
It lets filmmakers ask questions that conventional narrative can’t. What would you change, what can’t be changed, and what does it cost when you try? The best films here use temporal mechanics not as plot convenience but as the instrument each story requires to cut to its truth.
This list includes comedies, horror, hard science fiction, romantic fantasy, and everything in between. The only requirement is that the time travel does real work, that the story couldn’t function without it, that it changes or reveals something about the characters that no other device could.
My favorite toy in all of science fiction is time travel, and it’s the one I see abused most.
A writer gets a machine that can produce any outcome, and too many of them use it to dodge the consequences they set up. The films on this list refuse that shortcut. They pick their rules and pay for them, and a few of them devastated me doing it. I rewarded nerve here, and several of the best were made for pocket change.
Writers working on their own temporal narratives will find essential craft guidance in the Time Travel Handbook.
1. Back to the Future (1985)
► Read the full review of the Back to the Future Trilogy
⭐ IMDB: 8.5/10
“Roads? Where we’re going, we don’t need roads.”
Robert Zemeckis built a machine for delivering payoffs. Every detail planted in Back to the Future’s first act (the broken clock tower, the bolt of lightning, the “Save the Clock Tower” flyer, the way Marty’s father never stands up for himself) returns in the third act with precise, satisfying effect. Few films have achieved this density of plant-and-payoff without feeling mechanical, and fewer still have made the mechanism invisible.
The time travel serves a family story. Marty’s problem isn’t getting back to 1985, it’s that he’s watched his parents settle for less their entire lives and absorbed their limitations as his own.
Stranded in 1955, he has to push his father into the confrontation George McFly spent thirty years avoiding. That means Marty ends up fixing something in himself in the process. The DeLorean is just the vehicle. The film’s subject is whether you inherit your parents’ courage or their fear.
Michael J. Fox’s physical comedy and his chemistry with Christopher Lloyd are so good that audiences tend to overlook how tightly the screenplay is constructed. Zemeckis and Bob Gale wrote fourteen drafts. It shows, not in labored exposition but in the way every scene does double or triple duty.
This is the screenplay I’d hand to anybody who thinks plotting is dull clerical work. Fourteen drafts show in every scene, and the clock tower payoff still delights me. Zemeckis and Gale rarely get the credit they’ve earned. People remember Fox and Lloyd, and they should, but those two only get to be that much fun because the script never wastes a line on them.
2. Groundhog Day (1993)
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⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
“I’m not going to live by their rules anymore.”
Harold Ramis had the intelligence to never explain the loop.
No scientist appears to theorize about quantum branching. No curse is identified or lifted. Phil Connors is simply stuck, and the film asks a single question: if you’d unlimited time and no consequences, who would you eventually become? Ramis’s answer isn’t flattering to the cynical version of the question, Phil doesn’t find enlightenment through hedonism or power, he finds it through learning to be interested in other people.
The film is structured as a spiritual parable, and different religious traditions have claimed it for decades: Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, secular humanist. It works for all of them because the transformation Ramis depicts is specific and earned.
Phil doesn’t become good by deciding to be good. He becomes good by learning to play piano, by memorizing the things that matter to the people around him, by saving a boy from a tree so many times that saving the boy becomes reflex.
Bill Murray’s performance is the film. The way he moves through hopelessness toward something that doesn’t quite look like joy but is (the exhausted patience of a man who has run out of alternatives to caring) is one of the great screen performances of the era.
I think this is the wisest comedy Hollywood ever made, and the refusal to explain the loop is a big part of why. The moment somebody in a lab coat shows up to theorize, the film turns into a puzzle, and Ramis kept it a question about character. Murray’s slow thaw moves me every time I think about it. I admire how unglamorous the redemption is, piano lessons and a kid falling out of a tree, and that’s a version of becoming a better person I believe.
3. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
► Read the full review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
⭐ IMDB: 8.6/10
“No fate but what we make.”
Cameron’s great structural gamble: the villain of the first film is now the protector, and this reversal is never made explicit in dialogue.
You have to realize it as John Connor realizes it, from clues. The T-800 that killed people in 1984 is now teaching a ten-year-old how to smile. That contradiction is the film’s emotional engine, and Cameron earns it by committing to it completely instead of winking at the irony.
The action sequences are still unsurpassed for spatial clarity.
You always know where everyone is, what they want, and what’s in the way. Cameron stages the Galleria motorcycle chase with the same economy he brings to every scene: establish geography, introduce complication, resolve through character decision. The T-1000’s morphing capabilities were so revolutionary in 1991 that audiences forgot Cameron was also making the film’s best argument: if a machine can learn to not kill, what’s humanity’s excuse?
Edward Furlong’s John Connor is one of cinema’s more precise teen performances (not lovable, not admirable, difficult) which makes the Terminator’s patient, earned attachment to him more affecting than any of the film’s spectacular action.
I rank this as the best action film ever made, and I don’t think it’s close. Cameron could have coasted on the liquid metal effects, and he built the whole picture around a killer learning to care about a kid instead. That’s a gutsy choice for a blockbuster sequel. The Galleria chase is so clear that you always know where everybody stands, and I wish more directors working today studied it before they shot a single fight.
4. 12 Monkeys (1995)
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⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
“I want the future to be unknown.”
Terry Gilliam and David and Janet Peoples adapted Chris Marker’s La Jetée into a film whose design conveys its theme before a word of dialogue is spoken.
The future is all right angles and institutional gray; the past is warm, chaotic, oversaturated. Cole moves between them as a man who belongs to neither. Too damaged by the future to function in the past, too infected with the past to accept the future’s logic. Gilliam’s eye for institutional absurdism serves the material perfectly.
The film’s central trap is epistemological: Cole can’t prove he’s from the future, can’t prove he’s sane, and his attempts to convince anyone of either only deepen their certainty that he’s a paranoid schizophrenic. The audience is held in the same suspension. Is this prophecy or delusion? The film refuses to fully resolve this until the final airport sequence, and even then the resolution carries grief.
Bruce Willis gives one of his most unguarded performances. Cole isn’t a hero, not really even competent, just a traumatized man trying to accomplish a mission he barely understands. Brad Pitt’s Jeffrey Goines, mentally ill and played with terrifying energy, is Cole’s dark mirror: what it looks like when madness doesn’t have a future to travel back from.
Ready to craft your own science fiction narratives? The Science Fiction Writers Handbook breaks down the techniques that make speculative fiction connect with readers.
5. Primer (2004)
⭐ IMDB: 6.7/10
“Are you hungry? I haven’t eaten since later this afternoon.”
Shane Carruth made Primer for $7,000, shot it himself, cast himself in the lead, and produced something that most viewers still can’t fully diagram after multiple watches. The time travel logic is internally consistent and mathematically rigorous (Carruth has a degree in mathematics), yet the film’s subject is what happens to a friendship when one partner starts withholding information and the other starts doing the same, and how quickly mutual deception destroys trust that took years to build.
Carruth stages Aaron and Abe’s conversations with the naturalism of people who have worked together long enough to talk in half-sentences, interrupting themselves and each other.
They describe the machine they build in a storage unit in technical dialogue that neither explains itself to the audience nor condescends to the characters. Carruth trusts that you’ll follow the emotional logic even when the temporal logic defeats you. And the emotional logic is simple: two men who trusted each other find the thing that breaks that trust.
Primer is the most honest film about time travel ever made: it doesn’t romanticize the technology or its possibilities. Given the ability to go back and fix things, these men immediately and incrementally become worse versions of themselves.
Primer is the film I respect most on this page, even if it’s the hardest one to sit back and enjoy. Seven thousand dollars and a storage unit, and Carruth made something the big studios couldn’t touch. I keep thinking about how fast those two men turn on each other once the machine works. I think that’s the truest thing any film has said about what people would do with time travel, and it scares me more than any Terminator.
6. About Time (2013)
⭐ IMDB: 7.8/10
“The truth is I now don’t travel back at all. I just try to live every day as if I’ve deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it.”
Richard Curtis structured his most personal film as a three-act argument against nostalgia. Act one: Tim discovers time travel and uses it to improve his romantic life. Act two: he learns the limits of the device. It can fix awkward moments, it can’t fix a marriage, it can’t prevent his father from dying. Act three: he stops using it. The film’s radical thesis is that the time travel was never the point.
The point was learning to pay the kind of attention to your actual life that you’d pay if you knew you could go back. The father-son relationship between Tim and James (Domhnall Gleeson and Bill Nighy) is the film’s real subject, not the romance, though the romance is handled with Curtis’s characteristic warmth. Nighy plays a man who has somehow learned what the film is teaching, without ever having the ability that teaches it. How he got there’s left unexplained, and that’s right.
Curtis is often dismissed as sentimental, but About Time builds its emotion the hard way, by constructing real loss instead of threatening it. The last time Tim visits his father in the past, knowing it’s the last time, is one of the more devastating scenes in contemporary cinema.
People who sneer at Richard Curtis should sit through that last visit between Tim and his father. I find it almost unbearable in the best sense, because the film has spent its whole length teaching me what that power costs. Bill Nighy never gets enough credit for this role. He plays a man who already knows how to live, and he makes it look so easy that you barely notice he’s making the film’s argument.
7. La Jetée (1962)
⭐ IMDB: 8.2/10
“This is the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood.”
Chris Marker made a twenty-eight-minute film from still photographs and narration, and it remains among the most formally radical time travel stories ever constructed. The medium choice isn’t arbitrary. Memory is still photographs. To make a film about the relationship between memory, obsession, and temporal longing out of still photographs is to make the medium the argument: the man isn’t traveling through time, he’s traveling through memory, and memory is static.
The one moving image in the film, the woman on the pier opening her eyes, is so brief and so unexpected after twenty minutes of stills that it registers as revelation. Marker has established the grammar of stillness so completely that the single moment of motion conveys presence, real existing time, in a way it never could in a conventional film.
La Jetée inspired 12 Monkeys and influenced decades of science fiction, but it remains untranslatable. You can’t summarize it the way you can summarize other films because what it does can’t be separated from how it does it. The form and the content are identical.
8. Predestination (2014)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“I know where I come from. But where do all you zombies come from?”
The Spierig brothers adapted Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies”, one of the most logically closed time travel stories ever written, and had the sense to let the bootstrap paradox speak for itself. Predestination takes the closed causal loop to its absolute limit: a character who’s their own mother, father, and their own nemesis. This could be absurdist black comedy. Instead the film plays it with muted grief.
The long bar scene between Ethan Hawke’s temporal agent and Sarah Snook’s unnamed stranger carries the entire film’s weight on dialogue alone. Snook, playing multiple iterations of the same person, delivers a performance of such controlled complexity that the reveals land as tragedy. She makes you feel the loneliness of a person who is, literally, their own entire family.
Predestination asks the hardest question in time travel fiction: if every event was always going to happen, if every choice was always the choice you were always going to make, can anything be called a choice at all? The film doesn’t resolve this. It lives in the question.
Detailed plotting is a must for time travel narratives. Master the craft of weaving complex storylines in the Plot Handbook.
9. Looper (2012)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“This time travel crap, just fries your brain like an egg.”
Rian Johnson put the key scene in the middle of the film: a diner booth, two versions of the same man, one young and one old, and Old Joe’s instruction not to think too hard about the mechanics. It’s the film telling you directly what kind of story this is, not a logic puzzle but a character study about whether a selfish man can become capable of sacrifice. Johnson deliberately makes the time travel rules inconsistent and then dismisses his own inconsistency in dialogue, because the rules aren’t the subject.
The film works because the subject (the loop of violence, the inherited damage, the question of whether you can break what made you) is urgent and specific. Emily Blunt’s Sara is one of the better-drawn secondary characters in recent genre cinema: capable, frightened, neither helpless nor superhuman, a woman protecting her child with the means available to her.
Young Joe’s final choice is set up with such patient construction (his understanding of what Old Joe is and what Old Joe will do) that it arrives as logical conclusion. Johnson earned that ending by not cheating anywhere on the way to it.
I adore this film for the diner scene alone. Johnson has Old Joe tell his younger self to stop fussing over the mechanics, and it’s the nerviest line in modern science fiction because he’s right. What the story cares about is a selfish man learning to give something up, and the ending pays that off so cleanly that it moved me more than anything else in the picture.
10. The Terminator (1984)
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⭐ IMDB: 8.1/10
“The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.”
Cameron made The Terminator for $6.4 million by making a horror film about a relentless, unkillable pursuer. The time travel backstory is almost incidental to the immediate terror. Arnold Schwarzenegger understood this before Cameron did and refused to play the Terminator as menacing. He played it as empty: no affect, no hesitation, no presence except function. The absence of interiority makes it frightening.
The central paradox (John Connor sends back the man who fathers him. That means John Connor can’t exist without the war he’s trying to prevent) is handled with the lightest possible touch. Kyle Reese explains it once, in a scene designed more to establish his emotional commitment to Sarah than to resolve the temporal logic, and the film moves on. Cameron is more interested in the love story and the chase than the philosophy.
Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor transformation from ordinary waitress to a woman who survives the impossible is as complete a character arc as Cameron has ever written. She doesn’t become a warrior because the plot requires it. She becomes a warrior because she has no other option, and Hamilton makes every step of that reluctant hardening visible.
I enjoy this one a great deal, and it’s scarier than its sequel ever tries to be. Schwarzenegger’s blankness is the best decision anybody made on the production. My reservation is the love story. Reese and Sarah get one night and the script asks me to believe it’s the romance of the century, and I don’t quite buy it. It’s a lean, nasty chase film, and every time it slows down for tenderness it loses a step.
11. X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)
⭐ IMDB: 7.9/10
“Just because someone stumbles and loses their path, doesn’t mean they’re lost forever.”
Bryan Singer managed the most logistically complex task in recent superhero cinema: running two complete casts across two complete storylines, keeping both dramatically coherent, and using the time travel to justify the coexistence of two X-Men continuities that had become irreconcilable. The backstage problem and the story problem were the same problem, and Singer solved both.
The best scene in Singer’s film has nothing to do with its plot: Quicksilver moving through a frozen kitchen, setting up a sequence that solves a tactical problem the protagonists couldn’t solve, while a Jim Croce song plays at one-tenth speed. It’s pure cinema, editing and music and performance in exact proportion, and Singer earned it by spending the thirty minutes before it in tight, urgent narrative economy.
James McAvoy’s young Xavier holds the film together. The 1973 storyline is about a man who has given up on the thing that defines him, and McAvoy plays that abandonment without making it repellent. He makes it comprehensible. That’s harder and more useful for the story.
12. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)
⭐ IMDB: 6.9/10
“Be excellent to each other.”
At bottom, the joke is that the future treats two idiotic teenagers as the most important people who will ever live, and it commits to that joke completely and without condescension.
Bill and Ted are exactly what their slacker surface suggests: enthusiastic, kind, dimly curious, and constitutionally incapable of malice. The film argues that this is enough. The future agrees.
Keanu Reeves is doing something specific and difficult here, playing a character whose lack of self-awareness isn’t played for mockery. Ted doesn’t know he’s funny. Reeves plays him as completely sincere, the only way the film’s optimism works. If the film were winking at its characters, the message collapses.
The historical figures (Napoleon, Billy the Kid, Socrates, Genghis Khan) are handled with exactly the right amount of absurdist commitment. Each one behaves like a person, not a costume, and each one gets its own joke that understands what they were.
The best time travel films build protagonists who transform under temporal pressure. Create unforgettable characters with the Deep Character Handbook.
13. The Time Machine (1960)
► Read the full review of The Time Machine (1960)
⭐ IMDB: 7.5/10
“Which three books would you have taken?”
George Pal’s adaptation of Wells’s 1895 novel holds up better than its era because the Eloi/Morlock split is still legible class allegory. The beautiful surface-dwellers who have forgotten how to fight, fed and preyed upon by the underground workers who do the actual labor. Wells wrote this in 1895 and it remains uncomfortably applicable. Pal doesn’t underline the allegory; he dramatizes it and lets the audience make the connection.
The Oscar-winning time-lapse effect, the machine sitting still while seasons and decades accelerate around it, was achieved practically with stop-motion photography and remains more evocative than most CGI. The mechanism is visible, crude, and somehow more convincing for it. You believe the machine is sitting in time because you can see time moving past it.
Rod Taylor is a capable protagonist who gives the story what it requires. The film’s most interesting moment comes at the end, the time traveler returns to the far future with three books, and the question of which three is left deliberately unanswered. The choice of not specifying is itself a kind of answer.
I have real affection for this film, especially the machine sitting still while the seasons rush past it. It feels handmade in a way I miss. My complaint is Rod Taylor, who does the job and little more, so the ideas end up more vivid than the man carrying them through the centuries. The three books ending is a lovely touch, and I wish the rest of the performance had that kind of curiosity in it.
14. Timecrimes (2007)
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⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
“It’s not paranoia if they’re really after you.”
Nacho Vigalondo built a machine for escalating dread out of a single location, a handful of actors, and a rigorous application of one idea: every attempt Héctor makes to avoid or fix what he’s seen makes him the agent of what he was trying to avoid. The film is a logical trap with no exit. Each step Héctor takes is comprehensible, even inevitable, and leads directly to the next horror.
The bandaged figure stalking through the woods is one of the more economical monsters in genre film: constructed from nothing more than a man in bandages carrying scissors, it works because the context makes it threatening before you understand who or what it is. The later revelations work because Vigalondo has already made you afraid.
Timecrimes was made for roughly $3 million and runs eighty minutes. It contains more structural ingenuity than films made for fifty times the budget. The discipline of a limited location and a small cast forced Vigalondo to make every scene do maximum work.
15. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
⭐ IMDB: 7.3/10
“To hunt a species to extinction is not logical.”
The fourth Star Trek film is the lightest of the series and the most beloved.
That says something accurate about both the franchise and its audience. Leonard Nimoy understood that the best comedy comes from real character. Watching the Enterprise crew cope with 1986 San Francisco is funny because you already care about them, not because the fish-out-of-water jokes are especially clever.
The environmental message is delivered almost entirely through situation. Seeing whales that will one day save Earth rendered extinct by the casual decisions of the 20th century makes the argument without requiring a character to make a speech about it. Nimoy trusted the premise to carry the theme, the suitable level of trust.
Spock’s post-resurrection uncertainty is handled in exactly the right proportion, present enough to acknowledge what happened in the previous film, not so prominent that it overshadows the comedy. DeForest Kelley’s Bones, perpetually appalled by 1986 medical practice, gets some of the best lines of the series.
16. Army of Darkness (1992)
⭐ IMDB: 7.4/10
“Hail to the king, baby.”
Sam Raimi dropped Ash Williams into medieval England with a chainsaw hand and a shotgun and a single gag that runs ninety minutes: the hero is completely unqualified for heroism. Ash is vain, cowardly, lazy, and not very bright. He survives through luck, stubbornness, and one-liners delivered at inappropriate moments. The film commits to this characterization without apology and the result is one of cinema’s more honest portraits of accidental leadership.
Raimi constructs his slapstick sequences (Ash multiplying into tiny versions of himself, his reflection rebelling) with the precision of Buster Keaton’s physical comedy. The horror-comedy ratio shifts scene by scene, but Raimi never loses control of the tonal balance because he plays both the horror and the comedy straight. The Deadites are threatening. Ash is an incompetent man trying to manage them.
Bruce Campbell is the entire reason this works. His timing is so exact and his commitment to the material so complete that scenes that should be stupid become absurdist poetry. No one else could make “Groovy” land as a punchline in a medieval battle.
I’m fond of Ash, because he’s the hero most of us would turn out to be if we got dropped into a war with the dead. He forgets the magic words and wins anyway. Raimi never cheats by making him competent at the end, and I respect that more than a dozen polished epics that turn every slacker into a chosen one. Campbell’s timing is the whole show, and nobody has matched it since.
Every time travel story thrives on stakes and tension. Master the art of keeping readers on edge with the Conflict and Tension Handbook.
17. The Butterfly Effect (2004)
► Read the full review of The Butterfly Effect (2004)
⭐ IMDB: 7.6/10
“You can’t change who people are without destroying who they were.”
Bress and Gruber built a film around the experience of discovering that every solution makes things worse, not as abstract philosophical position but as lived, repeated catastrophe. Evan goes back seven times, and each time the fix breaks something else, and each iteration makes the original problem seem simpler and more manageable than what’s replaced it. The film is structured as escalating despair, and it commits to that escalation instead of resolving toward optimism.
Ashton Kutcher is working against type here, there’s real psychological damage in his performance that his previous roles hadn’t suggested, and Amy Smart, playing multiple versions of the same character across widely different circumstances, shows that character is the product of specific experience more than personality.
The director’s cut ending, in which Evan resolves the problem by going back to before his birth and refusing to live, is darker and structurally more honest than the theatrical version’s more ambiguous conclusion. Both versions work, but the director’s cut makes the film’s argument explicitly: some problems can’t be solved except by removing yourself entirely from the causal chain.
18. Somewhere in Time (1980)
► Read the full review of Somewhere in Time (1980)
⭐ IMDB: 7.2/10
“Come back to me.”
Jeannot Szwarc’s film is the purest romantic fantasy on this list, and it won its cult following by taking its premise with absolute seriousness. The time travel mechanism, Richard wills himself backward in time through self-hypnosis and absolute concentration, is the least scientific device in any film here, and Szwarc shoots the moment of temporal displacement as mystical experience. The film lives or dies on whether you accept this act of will as possible, and Richard’s preparation for it is documented in enough detail that most audiences do.
Christopher Reeve was in his prime here and brings the obsessive quality the role requires. Jane Seymour’s Elise is carefully constructed as worthy of that obsession. Specific, intelligent, contained, with the particular beauty that belongs to old photographs. John Barry’s score is structural, carrying emotional content that the dialogue deliberately withholds.
The penny that ends it, the intrusion of a single modern object into Richard’s immaculate concentration, remains one of the more poetic endings in time travel cinema. The logic is exact: he willed himself here, and all it takes is one modern thing to break the will entirely.
19. Deja Vu (2006)
► Read the full review of Déjà Vu (2006)
⭐ IMDB: 7.1/10
“What if you had to tell someone the most important thing in the world, but you knew they’d never believe you?”
Tony Scott made slick Bruckheimer thrillers as well as anyone, and Deja Vu is the best of them because the premise is smarter than the genre usually demands. The surveillance technology that lets agents watch the past without intervening (a four-day window into any location, locked in time) is a novel device, and the sequence in which Denzel Washington drives in the present while following a street as it existed four days ago is one of the more elegant pieces of action staging in Scott’s career.
Washington brings his full intelligence to Doug Carlin, not the effortless cool of his action roles but the attentive, slightly unsettled quality of a man working something out in real time. His growing connection to a woman he’s watching die in recorded footage is handled with enough restraint that when it tips into action, it doesn’t feel like genre convenience.
The ending raises questions it doesn’t fully answer about causal loops and parallel timelines, but Scott’s instinct, stop before the explanation kills the feeling, is the right instinct. Leave the viewer in the experience.
This is the film on the list I think gets underrated the most, and it’s the one I’d defend hardest. People compare it to Scott’s other slick thrillers and miss how clever that four-day window is. The chase through two time frames at once is pure invention, and Washington plays a man falling for somebody he’s watching die. That’s a sad, strange idea to smuggle into a Bruckheimer picture, and Scott pulls it off without once getting sticky about it.
20. Donnie Darko (2001)
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⭐ IMDB: 8.0/10
“Every living creature on Earth dies alone.”
Richard Kelly made Donnie Darko at twenty-six, on a budget of $4.5 million, and produced something that resists complete explanation in ways that are clearly intentional. The director’s cut released three years later added explanatory title cards and deleted scenes, and the consensus among its admirers is that the director’s cut makes the film worse. The experience of not quite understanding what’s happening to Donnie Darko, of being inside his psychological state instead of observing it, is the film.
Jake Gyllenhaal’s performance is the reason the film works. He plays Donnie as someone who experiences reality slightly differently from the people around him: not deranged, not brilliant, but mistuned in a way that makes the suburban 1988 setting feel uncanny. The Frank costume is one of cinema’s more effective nightmare images because nothing about it is explained.
Whether Donnie is a schizophrenic experiencing delusions or a figure in a real temporal drama whose sacrifice closes a tangent universe is a question the film deliberately refuses to resolve. Both readings require accepting loss as the outcome. That much isn’t ambiguous.
I like this film a lot, and the theatrical cut is the right one for people to remember. Gyllenhaal and that rabbit costume do more than any explanation could. My reservation is that a film this committed to mood keeps me at a slight distance, and I never feel for Donnie the way I feel for Marty or Phil. That’s why I give it a seven, a haunting picture I admire more than I love.
From romance to horror, time travel spans every genre. Master the conventions of each in the Genre Mastery Handbook.
Notable Explorations: Additional Time Travel Films
Source Code (2011)
Duncan Jones uses repeated eight-minute sequences to explore identity and sacrifice. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens must inhabit another man’s body to prevent a bombing. The ethical questions about identity and consciousness are more interesting than the thriller mechanics, and Jones handles both well.
Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)
Middle-aged regret as time travel comedy. Steve Pink gives his four leads real room to breathe, and the film is funnier than it’s any right to be, largely because John Cusack plays his version of the 1980s with the sourness of a man who wasn’t that happy the first time around.
Kate & Leopold (2001)
James Mangold’s romantic comedy uses temporal displacement to make Hugh Jackman’s Victorian duke a fish-out-of-water in modern New York. It works on the charm of its leads instead of the rigor of its logic, the suitable trade.
The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)
Robert Schwentke adapts Audrey Niffenegger’s novel about involuntary temporal displacement with real feeling for what makes the source material work. The relationship is the subject. The time travel is simply the burden this particular marriage carries.
Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)
Coppola’s underrated film gives Kathleen Turner a character study in the form of a time travel story: a middle-aged woman who discovers, on return to her 1960 high school, that she’d make most of the same choices again. Turner’s performance holds the film together.
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Franklin Schaffner’s film reveals its time travel premise only at the end, and the Statue of Liberty emerging from the sand remains one of cinema’s great reversals. A reveal that tells you everything about what humanity did with its time.
Time After Time (1979)
Nicholas Meyer pits H.G. Wells against Jack the Ripper in 1979 San Francisco. The premise sounds like camp but Meyer plays it straight, and Malcolm McDowell’s Wells, a Victorian progressive horrified by the century his machine arrives in, is a more complex figure than the thriller plot requires.
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Woody Allen’s lightest and most purely enjoyable late film uses temporal displacement to make a single argument: the people in your golden age thought their golden age was also a fallen age. Nostalgia is always retrograde. Owen Wilson is exactly right for it.
Frequency (2000)
Gregory Hoblit’s thriller uses an aurora borealis to let a son speak to his dead father across thirty years of radio transmission. The father-son relationship drives the film, and the thriller mechanics, each change rippling forward through time, are handled with real craft.
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
Mamoru Hosoda’s animated film gives a teenage girl the ability to replay moments and watches what she does with it. The conclusion (that you can’t protect everyone from consequence, and trying to costs things you didn’t calculate) arrives with surprising weight.
Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)
Colin Trevorrow’s indie keeps the question of whether Kenneth built a time machine open until the final scene, and uses that uncertainty to ask a more interesting question: does it matter whether you believe someone’s impossible dream, if believing it’s what they need?
The Lake House (2006)
Alejandro Agresti’s romantic drama uses a two-year temporal gap in correspondence to build a relationship that exists entirely in letters. Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock sustain the peculiar melancholy that the premise requires. Loving someone you can’t quite reach.
What Do You Think?
Which time travel film belongs on this list that didn’t make it? Drop a comment with the film, and tell me what it does that nothing else does.
Whatever you nominate, I’ll judge it by the same test I used here. Every film on this list makes the machine cost somebody something, a friendship in Primer and a father in About Time, and that price is the reason I care about any of them. A time travel story that lets its hero undo the pain for free is cheating its audience, and every one sold as clever is a cheap trick.
Honorable Mentions
5 more reviewed on this site and worth your time, ranked by the same scale as the list above.
21. Happy Death Day (2017) and Happy Death Day 2U (2019) Review
A slasher built on a time loop. That’s a better fit than it sounds because the repetition supplies the structure the genre usually lacks. The sequel changes genre to science fiction and mostly gets away with it.
22. Next (2007) Review
Nicolas Cage can see two minutes ahead, a limit precise enough to generate clever sequences, and the rug-pull ending is the bravest choice in the film, because it shows his foresight reaches further than the FBI understood. It’s a 10 from me.
23. Paycheck (2003) Review
John Woo directing Philip K. Dick, with a man who has traded his memory for a bag of apparently worthless objects that turn out to be exactly what he needs in sequence.
24. Frequency (2000) Review
A son communicates with his dead father across thirty years through a ham radio during an aurora, and every change he makes rewrites the present around him mid-scene.
25. The Final Countdown (1980) Review
A modern aircraft carrier is thrown back to December 1941 off Pearl Harbor, and the film is entirely about whether to intervene. Filmed aboard the actual USS Nimitz.
