Thanks to the time travel genre, “be kind, rewind” isn’t a movie night phrase that had to go obsolete along with the death of the VCR. However, as any good time travel movie will warn you: Be careful when you rewind, too. And when you fast-forward, for that matter.
Though our modern society still hasn’t accessed the technology it takes to, say, make a DeLorean that can travel through time, filmmakers have repeatedly dreamt up do-over machines to the point of irony. One might even begin to wonder if the movies themselves are the result of some vigilante vagabond from the future trying to deliver an urgent message to viewers. (Although, if that’s the case, Back to the Future’s warnings about not going back in time and seducing your teen-aged mother seem to fall under the “common sense” category.)
Regardless of how fantastical the genre might seem, there’s often a relevant message in many time travel movies: live in the present. So, stop kicking yourself for not getting to these yesterday, and don’t screw over tomorrow’s version of yourself by letting these pile up on your watch list. Here are the best time travel movies … of all time.
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Looper
Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars in this dystopian future thriller as a time-traveling hit man, otherwise known as a “looper.” His hit becomes complicated though, when the target sent back in time to be killed by him is his older self, played by Bruce Willis. – Emma Carey
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Donnie Darko
A troubled young man, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, receives word from a giant rabbit that the world is ending in 28 days. Then, his teacher gifts him a book on The Philosophy of Time Travel. The rest is up to Donnie Darko. – Emma Carey
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Edge of Tomorrow
Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt star in this underrated near-future time travel, alien-invasion action film. If that sounds like too much in one movie—like the full title Live Die Repeat: Edge of Tomorrow—don’t let that turn you off like it did some theatergoers. This film somehow pulls off a very difficult premise, turning an alien invasion film into a sci-fi war version of Groundhog Day. – Emma Carey
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Deja Vu
Denzel Washington stars as a government agent who is assigned to travel back in time as a way of retroactively investigating a domestic bomber in New Orleans. However, when he begins developing feelings for one of the future victims, he begins interfering with the course of time itself. – Emma Carey
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It’s a Wonderful Life
You don’t need to fast-forward to Christmas to enjoy this heartwarming classic. In a redemption arc reminiscent of A Christmas Carol, James Stewart stars as a cynical, detached father and businessman who finds on Christmas Eve replaying his life with the consequences of his grave wish to never have been born. – Emma Carey
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La Jetee
The late Chris Marker’s 1962 masterpiece clocks in at 28 minutes and is comprised of only black-and-white still photographs — and yet it remains the most haunting time travel story ever committed to film. Told in voiceover, and with only one scene in motion (Marker could only afford to rent a movie camera for a day), it recounts the saga of a man in a future post-WWIII Paris who’s sent back in time to help find a way to mend the present. A romantic relationship ensues, but in its haunting final moments, Marker’s film makes plain that there’s no escaping one’s fate — which is, always, death. – Nick Schager
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12 Monkeys
Upfront about the debt it owes La Jetée, Terry Gilliam’s 1995 sci-fi gem imagines the post-apocalyptic future as a filthy subterranean hell of steam, valves, and strange-faced overlords. Gilliam’s film tracks Bruce Willis’s test subject as he’s sent back in time to discover the cause of the viral outbreak that destroyed society. There, he falls in love with Madeleine Stowe and encounters Brad Pitt’s schizo would-be culprit, all while battling the psychological and emotional confusion wrought from jumping between decades. As in Marker’s film, the only constants in this topsy-turvy universe are love, death, and the inevitable failure of trying to change one’s destiny. – Nick Schager
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Time Bandits
Terry Gilliam’s original time-travel effort was 1981’s Time Bandits, a jovial children’s fantasy in which a young British boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) teams up with six time-traveling dwarfs who are using a stolen map to steal loot from various centuries. This leads to an encounter with Napoleon (a hilariously insecure Ian Holm) and a trip on the Titanic, as well as constant attempts to evade both the Supreme Being from whom they stole the map, and Evil (David Warner), who wants to acquire it for his own nefarious purposes. Told with a wicked sense of humor — and featuring various members of Gilliam’s Monty Python crew — it’s a rollicking adventure that, in its final moments, reveals a wickedly nasty streak. – Nick Schager
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Peggy Sue Got Married
Francis Ford Coppola’s underrated 1986 work finds Kathleen Turner’s unhappily married Peggy Sue fainting at her high school reunion and waking to find herself back in 1960, where she proceeds to do all the things she wished she’d done the first time around. That includes telling off bitchy classmates and sleeping with the guy she originally let get away, though Coppola’s film is less about righting past wrongs than about gaining much-needed perspective on the present, which here most directly relates to her faltering marriage to adulterous Charlie (Nicolas Cage). It’s a sweet and sentimental story about remembering why you got to where you are, replete with a strong Turner lead performance and a weirdo turn by Cage that foreshadowed his current, wack-a-doo career phase. – Nick Schager
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Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure
The greatest Cali-slacker time-travel adventure of all time, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure proved that not only geniuses get to alter human history. Using a centuries-spanning telephone booth to recruit past icons (Socrates, Napoleon, Genghis Khan) for their class presentation, dim-bulb San Dimas, California, best friends Bill S. Preston, Esq. (Alex Winter) and Ted “Theodore” Logan (Keanu Reeves) air-guitar their way through time in the hopes of getting a passing grade and finding wealth and glory with their band Wyld Stallyns. Ridiculous and riotous, it’s a goofy ’80s time capsule bolstered by the sarcastic wit of George Carlin as the duo’s exasperated future mentor/guide Rufus. – Nick Schager
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Timecrimes
A man looks out a window and sees a naked woman in his backyard; when he investigates, he’s stabbed and chased by a menacing figure whose head is wrapped in pink bandages. Fleeing, he finds a scientist who sticks him in a time machine and sends him hours backwards in time, where he quickly becomes the man with the bandaged head — merely one of the many ways in which Nacho Vigalondo’s ingenious low-budget Spanish thriller exploits time-loop paradoxes for suspense. Although a David Cronenberg remake was once in the works, it remains a film about duplicates that’s a true original. – Nick Schager
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Time After Time
What if renowned sci-fi author H.G. Wells had actually created a time machine? And more amazing still, what if one of his friends was actually Jack the Ripper, and he stole said time machine and traveled forward 90 years to the “present day” of 1979? Such is the outlandish premise of Time After Time, in which Malcolm McDowell’s Wells must play amateur detective in modern-day San Francisco, where the Ripper (David Warner) has resumed his female-slashing habits. Often dragged down by too much fish-out-of-water comedy (Wells is amazed by McDonald’s French fries!), it’s nonetheless energized by an undercurrent of despair over mankind’s inability to transcend its most brutal impulses. – Nick Schager
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Groundhog Day
While in actuality a non-time-travel film, Groundhog Day remains the pinnacle of the genre’s comedic entries. Forced to endlessly relive the same day over and over again, grouchy weatherman Phil (Bill Murray) reports on famed groundhog Punxsutawney Phil, avoids former acquaintance Ned (Stephen Tobolowsky), and woos his coworker Rita (Andie MacDowell) — and, once his Sonny and Cher-playing alarm clock finally begins driving him mad, tries a variety of ways to commit suicide. It’s a skipping-record nightmare that eventually becomes a vehicle for self-aware epiphanies, with Murray at his absolute funniest and most heartfelt. – Nick Schager
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The Terminator
Arnold Schwarzenegger’s most badass role was as the malevolent killer robot sent back in time to kill the mother (Linda Hamilton) of the future leader of the human resistance movement in James Cameron’s seminal actioner. Founded on a romantic-parental paradox and enlivened by Cameron’s muscular direction, it remains a signature entry in the genre both for its haunting vision of a dystopian machine-versus-man future and for its central Schwarzenegger performance as an unstoppable cyborg assassin, who — despite being transformed into something more heroic in the otherwise excellent 1991 follow-up Terminator 2: Judgment Day — remains one of science-fiction’s preeminent villains.
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Back to the Future
Forget the sequels, which were either elaborately garish (Part II) or just plain groan-worthy (Part III) — the original Back to the Future remains not only the best of the Michael J. Fox-Robert Zemeckis franchise, but also the finest time-travel movie ever made. With the help of mad-scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and his souped-up DeLorean, Marty McFly (Fox) inadvertently winds up back in the ’50s, where he has to make sure that his parents meet-cute and fall in love, lest he cease to exist. It’s a time-travel saga of both sharp humor and adrenalized action, and one that finishes with both an irresistible happily-ever-after fantasy about going back to change the here and now for the better, as well as one of the greatest sequel-establishing cliffhanger moments in movie history.
Nick Schager
Nick Schager is a NYC-area film critic and culture writer with twenty years of professional experience writing about all the movies you love, and countless others that you don’t.
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