Time-Travel Movies, Ranked by Someone Who Read the Manual

Every one of these movies has a plot hole, and every one of them would like you to stop drawing diagrams on the napkin.

Entries
13
Category
Film
Updated
  1. A steaming outdoor hot tub on a snowy ski-lodge deck, an energy drink can tipped over on its rim, neon light spilling across the snow.

    13. Hot Tub Time Machine

    Steve Pink · 2010

    Four friends, one ski-lodge hot tub, a trip back to the '80s. The title is the entire pitch and also the entire plot, and the film is shockingly at peace with that. Chevy Chase's repairman has a lot of energy.

  2. A bullet hole in a window with glass shards flowing upward back into the frame, a highway at night beyond.

    12. Tenet

    Christopher Nolan · 2020

    Less travel than a reversed spin cycle. It's loud, mostly inaudible and almost unbearably pleased with itself, and also contains set pieces nobody else would dare attempt. A magnificent headache with a good suit.

  3. A crumpled hand-drawn map with glowing holes, lying on a child's bedroom floor beside a toy knight.

    11. Time Bandits

    Terry Gilliam · 1981

    A boy and a gang of thieving dwarfs fall through holes in the fabric of time with a stolen map. Gilliam's first time-travel film is grubby, cynical and gloriously handmade. A child's adventure for adults with dark senses of humor.

  4. A dark wardrobe in an old seaside house, its door ajar, a ping-pong table visible in the room beyond.

    10. About Time

    Richard Curtis · 2013

    Domhnall Gleeson learns the men in his family can revisit their own past, then uses it to fix a dinner party. The time rules are fuzzy. The Bill Nighy scenes are not. Bring tissues and don't bring a whiteboard.

  5. Two old monitors facing each other across a small café counter, an endless tunnel of reflected screens between them.

    09. Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes

    Junta Yamaguchi · 2020

    A café owner's monitor shows two minutes into the future, and the whole film plays as one unbroken iPhone take in a real Kyoto café. Made on almost no money, it out-plots productions with a hundred times the budget.

  6. A summer sky over a riverbank, a schoolbag and a baseball glove on the grass, a walnut-shaped mark glowing faintly.

    08. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

    Mamoru Hosoda · 2006

    A teen discovers she can jump back in time and spends it, naturally, on karaoke and dodging awkward conversations. It's the most honest film here about what any of us would actually do with the power.

  7. A pair of binoculars on a lawn chair overlooking a forest, a roll of pink bandages unspooling across the grass.

    07. Timecrimes

    Nacho Vigalondo · 2007

    A man in the Spanish countryside, a pair of binoculars and a terrible afternoon that gets worse each time he tries to fix it. Ninety-two minutes, one budget-friendly time machine, zero wasted moves.

  8. A blunderbuss lying on a tarp in a Kansas cornfield, a pocket watch and a stack of silver bars beside it.

    06. Looper

    Rian Johnson · 2012

    Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a young Bruce Willis while Bruce Willis plays an old Joseph Gordon-Levitt. The film waves off its own paradoxes in one diner scene, then spends the rest of its time on the people.

  9. A vintage telephone booth parked in a dusty Western town square, an air guitar's imagined shadow on its glass.

    05. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

    Stephen Herek · 1989

    The only time-travel movie whose stakes are a high school history presentation, and it treats them with total seriousness. Its time logic is better than it has any right to be. Be excellent; it's the rules.

  10. A cluttered suburban garage at night, a crude metal box wired to car batteries under one bare lightbulb.

    04. Primer

    Shane Carruth · 2004

    Two engineers build a box in a garage. Shot for $7,000, won Sundance's Grand Jury Prize, and refuses to explain itself, which is either rude or the most respectful thing a movie has ever done for you.

  11. A cracked stone floor of an abandoned department store, a lone animal pawprint trail and a wall stenciled with red animal shapes.

    03. 12 Monkeys

    Terry Gilliam · 1995

    Bruce Willis, sent back from a ruined future, is never sure he isn't simply losing his mind, and neither are you. Brad Pitt got an Oscar nomination for twitching. Inspired by La Jetée, and worthy of it.

  12. A motorcycle and a shotgun abandoned in a concrete flood channel at dusk, the sky glowing an ominous orange.

    02. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

    James Cameron · 1991

    The time travel is just the delivery van for the best action movie of its decade. Linda Hamilton doing pull-ups in a psych ward is the closest cinema has come to a thesis statement.

  13. A brick clock-tower silhouette under a lightning-split sky, a cable stretched across the street below it.

    01. Back to the Future

    Robert Zemeckis · 1985

    The perfect machine: a DeLorean, a clock tower, 88 mph and a script so efficient every throwaway line pays off later. It's also an extremely weird movie about your mom, and somehow nobody minds.

Honorable mentions

  • An object that evokes La Jetée.

    La Jetée

    Chris Marker · 1962

    A 28-minute short told almost entirely in still photographs, so it can't rank as a feature. It's the reason 12 Monkeys exists and the reason film students stare into the middle distance.

Dishonorable mentions

  • An object that evokes Terminator Genisys.

    Terminator Genisys

    Alan Taylor · 2015

    A sequel that time-travels into its own franchise and starts rearranging the furniture. The timeline is now a cat's cradle, and nobody in the theater was holding the other end.

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