Time travel movies aren’t really about time. Yes, the idea of moving through time is fantastical, but such stories are conduits to explore themes as diverse as nostalgia, regret, fate and free will. These are my picks for the 10 best movies about time travel.
10. My Old Ass (2024, dir: Megan Park)
“If I knew then what I know now, I’d have been better off.” That is the supposition behind My Old Ass, which, despite an arguably unfortunate title, is a comedy-drama of surprising depth and humanity. Maisy Stella is terrific as Elliott, an 18-year-old in her last summer before college. She is tripping on shrooms with friends when she is visited by herself from 21 years in the future (Aubrey Plaza as the older Elliott). Writer-director Megan Park takes a gamble on the high-wire concept. She wisely doesn’t bother with grasping for contortions of logic to explain the outlandish situation, instead interested in pursuing emotional heft. There are laughs to be had, but this is one comedy where it pays to bring tissues.
9. Palm Springs (2020, dir: Max Barbakow)
If you’ve seen Groundhog Day, the premise is familiar: a hapless protagonist is condemned to repeat the same day over and over, or as Palm Springs’ Nyles puts it, “one of those infinite time-loop continuums you’ve heard about.” Palm Springs is obviously inspired by Groundhog Day, but it is no knockoff. Nyles (Andy Samberg) is spending a literal eternity as the plus-one at a Palm Springs, California, wedding where his girlfriend (Meredith Hagner) is a bridesmaid. Lo and behold, he inadvertently ensnares the bride’s cynical sister, played by Cristin Milioti, into that pesky continuum. Andy Siara’s screenplay is clever and endearingly silly, and first-time feature director Max Barbakow keeps things snappy. The picture’s secret weapons are Samberg and Milioti. Their rapport makes Palm Springs downright lovable.
8. La Jetée (1962, dir: Chris Marker)
It took Chris Marker only about 28 minutes––flawless minutes, mind you ––to unspool a story of premonition, apocalypse, time travel and fate. He makes some bold choices in La Jetée, purportedly due to not having a camera at the time. Limitation fosters brilliance. Relying on grainy black and white still photographs, voiceover narration and interesting sound design, the French writer-director fashions a work that is haunting, ruminative and startlingly creative. The guts of the narrative get a makeover in Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (see #5), but both films are knockouts.
7. Looper (2012, dir: Rian Johnson)
Writer-director Rian Johnson crams in so many ideas here, it initially looks as if Looper might collapse under its own weight. Dystopia, time travel, telekinesis, gangland killings––there are a lot of ground rules to keep track of in this sci-fi actioner. But the movie plays fair with its own complicated construct. We start in 2044, where time travel is about 30 years away, but still figures prominently in the lives of “loopers,” killers hired by a futuristic crime syndicate to assassinate and dispose of targeted baddies transported from the future. It is an insidiously efficient system: a looper waits in the middle of nowhere for a hooded victim to materialize from thin air, only to promptly blast that poor bastard to smithereens. And when it’s time to clear up loose ends, the looper is sent to whack his future self. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a looper who makes the costly mistake of failing to off his older self (Bruce Willis). But old Joe arrives in 2044 with his own agenda to stop a certain future from taking shape.
6. The Terminator (1984, dir: James Cameron)
James Cameron directed and co-wrote (with Gale Anne Hurd) this crackerjack sci-fi that put him on the map and gave Arnold Schwarzenegger his most iconic role. Schwarzenegger plays a cyborg assassin who arrives in modern-day Los Angeles from the year 2029, when artificial intelligence systems have nearly extinguished the human race. Humanity’s salvation, it turns out, is a guy named John Connor, and those evil machines have dispatched the Terminator to eliminate Sarah Connor before her to-be-conceived son can lead a resistance. There’s another time traveler, too: Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), a resistance fighter tasked with protecting Sarah. Don’t think too hard about holes in the mind-bending plot. Cameron’s first box-office hit and second directorial feature demonstrates his mastery of pacing, muscular action sequences and spectacular visuals. He even sprinkles in some dry humor, thanks to the taciturn Terminator’s way with a catchphrase. Two years later, Cameron made Aliens, and the blockbusters kept a-comin’ after that.
5. Twelve Monkeys (1995, dir: Terry Gilliam)
This reimagining of the 1962 classic short La Jetée (see #8) conjures a future world devastated by a global pandemic that has killed billions and forced society to burrow underground. Bruce Willis portrays James Cole, a violent prisoner in 2035 sent by scientists back to 1996 to collect information about the moment that humanity went to hell (remember when civilization-ending viruses were the stuff of fiction?). Twelve Monkeys simmers in its own melancholy, even down to Willis’ baleful eyes, as it careens toward an inexorable fate. The ending still gives me chills. Scripted by the husband-wife team of David and Janet Peoples and directed by Terry Gilliam with his customary visual aplomb, the film is poignant, mysterious and achingly beautiful. Willis and Madeleine Stowe deliver strong performances, but best of all is a bonkers Brad Pitt as a mentally unstable rich kid who might just be responsible for the end of the world.
4. Interstellar (2014, dir: Christopher Nolan)
Like the best of Christopher Nolan, Interstellar swings for the proverbial fences. Earth is slowly dying in a not-too-distant future, with massive dust storms ravaging American farmlands. Among those impacted is Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widower and former NASA engineer now raising two children. Eventually, he and another NASA type, played by Anne Hathaway, are recruited to helm a space mission to a wormhole near Saturn. On the other side of the universe, the astronauts learn, are three planets possibly suitable to serve as humankind’s next home. In that wormhole, Cooper and crew slingshot around in time and space. A particularly stirring sequence finds our hero impacting his own future by jumping back in time, in a twisty narrative that could make M.C. Escher woozy. Nolan and his brother Jonathan scripted in close consultation with acclaimed astrophysicist Kip Thorne. While I cannot attest to the science of Interstellar, I couldn’t care less when the storytelling is this extraordinary.
3. Slaughterhouse-Five (1972, dir: George Roy Hill)
This audacious adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 classic inexplicably failed to register with movie audiences of the time despite it having made a splash at 1972’s Cannes Film Festival. Its lack of stature today is baffling. Slaughterhouse-Five more than delivers on the novel’s absurd science-fiction and comic existentialism in the life of the “unstuck in time” Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks). Time-tripping without control, he shuttles from being a World War II prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany, to a planet called Tralfamadore where he and skin-flick star Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine) are encouraged to mate. If Sacks is a bit more of a blank slate than necessary, the supporting cast is mainly excellent, particularly Eugene Roche as a kindly POW, Ron Leibman as an unhinged GI and Sharon Gans as Billy’s insecure wife. Armed with Stephen Geller’s clever nonlinear script and brilliantly edited by Dede Allen, George Roy Hill’s Slaughterhouse-Five is the masterpiece that no one knows.
2. Back to the Future (1985, dir: Robert Zemeckis)
For such a monster hit, Back to the Future flirts with some real weirdness. A teenage boy travels back in time, bumps into his parents as high schoolers, and finds that his future mom is horny for him. It’s not the standard formula for a summer blockbuster, but writer-director Robert Zemeckis and co-screenwriter Bob Gale crafted a perfectly calibrated blend of comedy, action and wit. As the kid who accidentally travels back to 1955 courtesy a DeLorean, Michael J. Fox is a wonderfully likable Marty McFly. He shot the picture on nights and weekends, whenever he wasn’t at work on TV’s Family Ties. The experience proved nearly as exhausting as time travel. “The character of Marty McFly––a skateboarding, girl-chasing high school rock ‘n’ roll musician––seemed like the kind of guy I could play in my sleep,” wrote Fox in his memoir Lucky Man. “That very nearly turned out to be the case.”
1. Groundhog Day (1993, dir: Harold Ramis)
A brilliant concept executed and acted with consummate skill, this romantic comedy involves a time-loop in which a smug TV weatherman is forced to experience February 2 over and over again. That date, of course, corresponds to the annual event when the world’s most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, supposedly predicts whether there will be six more weeks of winter. As the aforementioned weather guy, Bill Murray portrays Phil Connors as an insufferable jerk none too pleased about being stuck with a TV producer (Andie MacDowell) and cameraman (Chris Elliott) in tiny Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, for the big day. Danny Rubin, who co-wrote the script with director Harold Ramis, originally envisioned Phil as repeating the day over the course of thousands of years. While the duration of the time-loop isn’t clear, the stages of repetition in Groundhog Day are enough to force our antihero into facing some uncomfortable, albeit hilarious, truths about existence.
Honorable mention: Arrival (2016, dir: Denis Villeneuve), Back to the Future Part II (1989, dir: Robert Zemeckis), Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989, dir: Stephen Herek), The Butterfly Effect (2004, dir: Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber), Donnie Darko (2001, dir: Richard Kelly), Frequency (2000, dir: Gregory Hoblit), Il Mare (2000, dir: Lee Hyun-seung), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986, dir: Francis Ford Coppola), Source Code (2011, dir: Duncan Jones), Time After Time (1979, dir: Nicholas Meyer)
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 