The 35 Best Time Travel Movies 

Jean-Claude Van Damme is a cop who polices time. Don’t need to say more, but I guess I will. In 1994, time travel becomes a favorite pastime of criminals, and timecops like Van Damme must catch any chronal abusers and bring them to justice. As is often the case, Van Damme’s own time-muckery with the past creates different and divergent timelines that not even Doc Brown’s chalkboard could work out. But Timecop isn’t exactly a film that’s going for narrative clarity here.

Although most people would file this film under “flop,” The Final Countdown contains such an amazing premise it has to be recognized. The crew of the U.S.S. Nimitz enters a storm vortex and is transported to Pearl Harbor in 1941, turning a favorite imaginary war-game scenario into real life. Although the actual film elements aren’t necessarily memorable, it does give us an incredibly good look at the Nimitz (the film was shot on the actual carrier).

We tossed in The Philadelphia Experiment at the same spot, since it’s essentially the reverse of The Final Countdown.

By the time director Barry Sonnenfeld directed Men in Black 3 in 2012, the franchise was 15 years removed from its fun and campy original, and Men in Black 2 had sucked out much of the charm. That’s why MiB 3, despite its faults, is still a surprising underdog of a film.

 Agent J (Will Smith) goes back in time to stop an alien from mucking up the past and killing Agent K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Brolin). The film recaptures much of the original’s fun, and Josh Brolin’s portrayal of a young Tommy Lee Jones playing Agent K is simply awe-inspiring. Honestly, that acting work alone earns this spot for MiB 3.

Sort of like E.T., but with time travel. What Flight of the Navigator lacks in a substantial plot, it more than makes up for in charm.

David Scott Freeman falls into a ravine and is knocked unconscious—for eight years. Although he doesn’t age, everyone he knows does, and he soon finds he’s part of something much larger. It’s a fun film that will never outshine any Spielberg classics, but its campiness is too genuine to ignore.

H.G. Wells, Jack the Ripper, and time travel ... that’s it. Just click the arrow.

A film with perhaps the lowest budget on this list, Timecrimes is a Spanish-language movie that follows a typical time travel trope (many copies of one person causing major problems) but creates 92 minutes of truly enjoyable cinema. The fun moments of Timecrimes are the reveal after reveal after reveal, which snowballs into a fascinating plot.

Source Code is like Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow with a twist. Instead of going back in time as himself, Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) enters the body of someone else as he tries to stop a mass murder attempt. What the film lacks in depth, it more than makes up for in pulse-pumping action, and the premise itself is a refreshing take on the usual time travel idea.

It will likely never be considered an example of high science fiction, but as far as time travel goes, it gets good grades.

Perfect amounts creepy and perplexing, Donnie Darko is another strange example of time travel, which is why it belongs on this list all the more. Darko (Gyllenhaal again) is a high school kid with a less-than-sunny disposition. But when he begins seeing frightening hallucinations of a deranged and grotesque rabbit, things slowly begin to unravel, going from bad to weird pretty quickly.

For such a small-budget film (that was almost released straight to home video!) it’s made an outsized impact on science fiction and indie filmmaking. It’s a great movie, but also a polarizing one.

Director Colin Trevorrow’s debut film Safety Not Guaranteed follows three journalists—well, one journalist and two interns—on a road trip to meet the eccentric Kenneth (Mark Duplass), who placed an ad in a local newspaper looking for a time-travel companion. Although at its heart a romantic comedy, the film explores human perception of time and the indelible regrets, traumas, and even fantasies that fill our memories. Although the idea of actual time travel plays a significant role in the film, it’s used mostly as a symbol to analyze the importance of being present and always looking with hope toward the future.

Smashing together the old X-Men guard with the new is what makes X-Men: Days of Future Past one of the more successful cinematic outings for the mutant team.

 In the film, Kitty Pryde sends Wolverine back through time to stop apocalyptic events from unfolding. Maybe that’s not the most original plot, but it’s one that’s too fun to resist (if only for the Quicksilver scene alone).

Based on Robert Heinlein’s sci-fi short story “All You Zombies,” Predestination is a head trip, like any proper time travel film should be. With a strong performance from Ethan Hawke and a script that will keep you guessing, the film is one of the more solid time travel entries in recent years and is a film that garners a rewatch so you can catch every detail.

The Next Generation’s big screen outings are a mixed bag, to put it nicely, but the best film by far is the time-bending Star Trek: First Contact. Jean-Luc Picard and the crew of the USS Enterprise-E travel to the past to prevent the cybernetic Borg from mucking with Earth’s history. It’s a good film all by itself, but even more excellent if you’re an invested Star Trek fan. We get to see huge, never-before-seen moments in the Star Trek universe, like humanity’s first encounter with the Vulcans, and the Borg are just an excellent adversary.

“Shop Smart. Shop, S-Mart.”

Depending on who you ask, Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness is either the best sequel to any film ever, or the worst—there isn’t much room in between. The chainsaw-toting Ashley “Ash” Williams is tossed back to medieval times where he must fight off a horde of undead monstrosities with only his ingenuity and his “boom stick.”

Even though it’s slapstick comedy with wonderfully B-movie action sequences, it remains an absolute joy to watch.

In this Marvel sleeper hit, Stephen Strange (played by Benedict Cumberbatch) becomes the Sorcerer Supreme, and in typical Marvel fashion, is tasked with saving the world. Although the visuals alone are worthing giving this movie a shot, its manipulation of time as a superpower rather than a world-altering plot device is what sets it apart from the rest.

Although not technically time travel (long stretches of cryo-sleep instead), Sleeper is Woody Allen’s sci-fi comedy that’s absurd, hilarious, and strangely poignant. Miles Monroe is a jazz musician and health-food-store owner who wakes up in the 22nd century after a botched gall bladder operation. The world is, as you’d expect, quite different, and Monroe is a hilarious character to explore it with.

Tenet is an “A for effort” addition to this list. The film has all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan flick—stunning cinematography, a star-studded cast, head-scratching plot points, etc., etc. And Tenet does take time travel movies one step further with the introduction of time inversion, the idea that objects and people can travel into the past at the same temporal pace that they can travel into the future. Although a fascinating concept, it’s also a confusing one, which is why Nolan spends much of the film’s 150-minute runtime explaining what’s going on. Tenet is a fascinating time travel story though ultimately one a bit lost in its own exposition.

This 2006 award-winning anime is a coming-of-age time travel story that even rivals Back to the Future. After schoolgirl Mokoto Konno discovers a time travel device that gives her the power to leap through time, she uses her new gifts for mundane high school stuff, passing tests, avoiding awkward conversations, and to address her chronic lateness.

When she learns what her time traveling does to others around her, and as the seriousness of her time jumping becomes more apparent, the film blossoms into an important story about loss and friendship.

Crime noir meets science fiction in Rian Johnson’s Looper, and the match is magical. In a future where time travel is invented and immediately made illegal, crime syndicates use the technology for time-hopping assassinations. But to tie off some temporal inconsistencies, the assassin must eventually become the target—and that’s where things get interesting. This isn’t flawless sci-fi, but it’s certainly inventive.

On its surface, the German film Run Lola Run is about a blazingly red-headed woman running through the streets of Berlin in an attempt to save her boyfriend’s life. However, the twist is that once Lola reaches a dead-end (sometimes literally) in one of her runs, the film starts over from the beginning and Lola runs through Berlin once again, only this time small changes in her path create largely divergent outcomes by the film’s end. Although time is more of a thematic device than a strictly plot-driven one in Run Lola Run, its ruminations on time and the exploration of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that small incidents can have lasting repercussions, makes Run Lola Run one of the most unique films on this list.

What happens when the big purple monster man annihilates half the population? Time travel, baby. Tony Stark and gang concoct a convoluted plan that’ll save the universe from being cleaved in two, including some very inventive scenes that play with time travel. Like most time travel plots, Endgame creates more questions than it answers, but it’s best to just sit back and enjoy.

Like iconic director Stanley Kubrick, Christopher Nolan loves to hop around genres. Whether a superhero flick, a magical period piece, or a psychological thriller, Nolan has demonstrated time and again that he knows how to make a movie. While Interstellar doesn’t stand up to Kubrick’s sci-fi opus 2001, it’s a fascinating look into faster-than-light travel and does due diligence to present the theories behind this kind of travel as accurately as possible.

 In the film, Joseph Cooper leaves Earth in search of another habitable planet. After some troubling deep space encounters, Cooper must somehow send a message to his daughter back on Earth in order to save humanity. It’s a fascinating idea, and Nolan’s treatment of the material makes for a great two-and-a-half hours of sci-fi.

When it comes to time travel fiction, nothing gets quite as iconic as The Time Machine. Based on the novel by H.G. Wells, which coined the term “time machine,” this 1960 film adaptation is a classic take on a classic story. H. George Wells travels through time and eventually to the year A.D. 802,701 where he meets the Eloi, Morlocks, and a world completely unlike his own.

 The story itself might be old, but it never gets old.

Based on the Japanese novel All You Need Is Kill, Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow essentially takes the concept of Groundhog Day and applies it to a military fighting an overpowering alien race. Whereas Bill Murray’s temporal nightmare is never quite explained, however, Edge of Tomorrow eventually reveals the reason why William Cage (Tom Cruise) is stuck in a time loop. It’s a film that is better than it has any right to be and another great example of time-travel fiction done right.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of La Jetée (French for The Pier) on the time travel genre. Described as a 28-minute-long “Photo Novel,” the film focuses on man from an apocalyptic future who must find a past memory to save the future. This might sound familiar as Terry Gilliam expanded the idea in The 12 Monkeys, but has left an indelible mark on other sci-fi and time travel films as well. 

In Groundhog Day, disgruntled weatherman Phil Connors, played by the legendary Bill Murray, is forced to relive the same day over and over and over. Film experts have theorized Connors is trapped in the same day (the titular Groundhog Day) anywhere from 33 years to tens of thousands of years. Although this time loop is never explained (it likely has more to do with the power of positivity than any sort of hard physics), the film nevertheless explores how such relentless temporal monotony—as well as listening to Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe” on repeat—could possibly affect the human psyche.

We had more than a few arguments about whether Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival should even have a place on this list. Its peculiar handling of time features no physical time traveling, but the idea of time’s fluidity plays an increasingly larger role throughout the film and ultimately makes it one of the more memorable works of science fiction of the past decade. So here it is.

This film is “most excellent.” One of Keanu Reeves’s greatest achievements outside of The Matrix, 1989’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is kind of stupid, and yet, scientifically impossible to hate.

Two less-than-studious high schoolers get their hands on a time machine and use it to make a stellar report for history class. Abraham Lincoln, Genghis Khan, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid, Napoleon, Sigmund Freud, and Socrates are all brought into the future. I can’t even imagine what kind of historical ramifications that would have, but it’s best not to think about it.

Captain Kirk and crew must travel back 200 years to 1986 to recover a humpback whale, which is extinct in the future, in order to stop an alien probe from annihilating Earth.

It’s Star Trek. It’s time travel. It’s whales. It’s great.

In the incredibly capable directing hands of Alfonso Cuarón, the Harry Potter series went from a children’s franchise to something much more with Prisoner of Azkaban. With time turner in hand, Harry and Hermione’s temporal adventure to save Hogwarts still stands as the absolute best film in the franchise. 

Most Planet of the Apes films (except for the recent prequel series) are time travel films, but the first is the best. With a screenplay from sci-fi legend Rod Serling, 1968’s Planet of the Apes is just a monumental film in not only time travel fiction, but also science fiction in general. Charlton Heston plays George Taylor, who crash lands on a mysterious planet after traveling near light speeds. What unfolds is a story you likely know with an ending that’s become enshrined in popular culture.

Inspired by the 1962 French short film La Jetée, 12 Monkeys is about a deadly virus and a last-ditch effort to save humanity. James Cole (Bruce Willis) is sent back in time to hopefully avoid his own nightmarish future. What follows is two hours of sci-fi noir excellence with incredibly deep artistic talent, with Brad Pitt, Christopher Plummer, and Terry Gilliam behind the camera. The film remains one of the best examples of time travel fiction and is ubiquitously beloved by all sci-fi buffs.

Considered part of Terry Gilliam’s “trilogy of imagination” (which also includes the incredible sci-fi film Brazil), Time Bandits is a cinematic oddity that’s undeniably brilliant. The main character Kevin joins six dwarves who repair the fabric of time for the Supreme Being, and also pocket some treasure. This film hops all over the timeline and truly is an example of the nearly endless bounds of Gilliam’s imagination.

The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgement Day are perfect pieces of science fiction. We all know the story. A future T-800 Model 101 Terminator, iconically played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is sent back to 1984 Los Angeles with orders to kill Sarah Connor, the future mother of Skynet’s most fearsome enemy, John Connor. Although Schwarzenegger plays the villain in James Cameron’s original masterpiece, he reprises the role in 1991’s T2—this time as the hero.

Both films are great, but since they each use the same time travel schtick (naked person/robot + time bubble thingie), we’re just going to put them at the same spot.

Although Primer is the clear “art house” pick on this list, it’s a film with so much ingenuity, it’s hard not to watch in amazement. Directed by Shane Carruth, Primer is basically what it would be like if Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, instead of inventing Apple in their garage, discovered time travel.

Two engineers, Aaron and Abe, build a machine that essentially creates a time loop. But cumulative uses of the box soon creates problems as Aaron and Abe begin wreaking havoc on the timeline, creating multiple versions of themselves.

 It’s not the most flashy or Hollywood-friendly film on this list, but it is so refreshingly different that it easily earns its place among the very best.

Could there really be any other?

In 1985, Robert Zemeckis created a film and a subsequent franchise with so much heart and imagination that no other time travel film has ever matched it. Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox, escapes to 1955 and accidentally alters the timeline. He and scientist Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) have to team up to set things right again. Every role feels perfectly cast and every moment is as memorable as the next. It also happens to have one of the coolest time machines in sci-fi history. One car company is even trying to resurrect the famous ride.

Although the sequels would never quite reach to the original, they certainly didn’t damage the trilogy, which remains one of the best in cinema. And sure, there are a lot of plot points you could pick apart (“Wow, doesn’t our son Marty look just like our good friend Marty from 1955?!”), but no time travel movie perfectly cements all these narrative problems. If anything, plot holes are an indispensable part of the genre.

Now if you don’t mind, we’re going to make like a tree, and get outta here.