funny time travel movies

10 Funniest Time Travel Comedy Movies

The concept of fictional characters traveling to the past or the future has been explored many times, sometimes in a very humorous manner.

Time travel is one of the most commonly used concepts in sci-fi movies and while plots revolving around it are interesting on their own, sprinkling comedy into the proceedings is guaranteed to boost the quality. Movie lovers have thus gotten used to being treated to time travel comedies every single year

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Among the numerous options in the category, a few are more recommendable because they have a higher laugh-per-minute quotient than the others. This is because they have talented casts full of comedic actors as well as decent jokes and gags that stick to the mind long after the events come to a conclusion.

10 Historical Figures Pour Into The Present In Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

Keanu Reeves might have earned his seat on the table of the coolest action stars but he has been in a number of amazing comedies too. One of those is Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure where two teenagers struggling to pass their history assignment go back in time to actually interact with the figures they are researching on.

For history buffs, the movie is a blast as it features comical depictions of Napoleon Bonaparte, Joan of Arc, Abraham Lincoln, Socrates, and Ludwig van Beethoven. As respected as these figures are, the movie treats them as caricatures by thrusting them into all sorts of awkward situations once they are transported to modern times.

9 Fortunes Change For A Group Of Friends In Hot Tub Time Machine

There have been many creative ways to travel back in time and in Hot Tub Time Machine , it all happens via a hot tub at a resort. The comedy begins with the cliché plot of friends going on a vacation on an island but soon find themselves in 1986 after deciding to relax in a tub.

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Throughout the film, the likable cast that includes naturally funny actors like Rob Corddry and Craig Robinson gives audiences every reason to smile. However, it's the numerous interesting scenarios that pop up in the new time period that make the movie exciting. One of those involves one of the friends failing to transform back into his younger self because he was born after 1986.

8 There Is A Major Culture Clash In Black Knight

Among the numerous underrated comedies of the 2000s is Black Knight , where Jamal, a theme park employee accidentally gets transported back in time to 1328 England. There, the citizens hold him in high regard until they realize he isn’t who he says he is.

Starring Martin Lawrence at his peak, the movie is packed with endless visual gags, mostly stemming from Jamal trying to incorporate modern practices into medieval society. The verbal exchanges are hilarious too and so are the costume differences since he insists on wearing his jeans and shirt at all times.

7 Back To The Future Has One Of The Greatest Movie Characters

A movie where a teenager threatens his own existence by preventing his parents from falling in love is definitely one that’s guaranteed to delight and Back To The Future doesn’t disappoint. Much of the credit goes to Emmett "Doc" Brown who has gone on to be considered one of the greatest ever movie characters .

Doc's physical appearance and actions are main the reservoirs of humor. There's always the threat of something going wrong too, even when a problem has been solved, hence creating endless anxiety. Additionally, the movie proves itself superior to other sci-fi and comedy offerings by focusing more on storytelling rather than visual spectacle.

6 A Teenager's Wish Comes True In 13 Going On 30

The limitations that come with being young can be frustrating, that’s why 13-year-old Jenna keeps wishing she was an adult in 13 Going On 30. Interestingly, his wishes come true when she wakes up to find out that she is not only 30 years old but has also been transported from 1987 to 2004.

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13 Over 30 is hoisted by strong performances by Jennifer Garner, Mark Ruffalo, and Andy Serkis, but it’s the former who shines the most as her character tries to make sense of what's happening. As expected, most things go wrong for the adult Jenna and while her experiences are funny, they also serve as cautionary moments for those dreaming of better lives than the ones they have.

5 In Click, An Architect Can Remote-Control His Life

Life would be interesting if one could fast-forward or rewind their lives and that’s the idea Click explores to humorous effect. In it, an architect named Michael can skip or go back to events he desires the most.

While this seems like a good option to have, the movie goes the classic things-go-wrong route when the remote start operating by itself after learning he only desires success. It thus fast forwards him to a promotion and then a decade later when he has become boss, making him miss out on important family events. The quest to discard the remote and reverse time then starts.

4 The Adam Project Blends Action & Laughs

To many fans, The Adam Project is one of the most satisfying movies of 2022 because of the healthy friendship between the younger and older versions of Ryan Reynolds; character, Adam. In it, a dystopian fighter pilot from 2050 meets a child version of himself after he crash-lands in 2022.

As is the case with most Ryan Reynolds movies, there are plenty of goofy moments that make every single scene enjoyable. These are blended with incredible action sequences as well as aerial dogfights. The villain is more laughable than threatening too, hence the quest to defeat him becomes more of a fiesta than a dark journey.

3 Everyone Is Dumb In Idiocracy

A high IQ is highly beneficial in the real world but not so much in the society depicted in Idiocracy . Events in the comedy revolve around a U.S. Army librarian named Joe who finds himself in the year 2505 after participating in a hibernation experiment. Since technology has advanced so much, people don't need to be smart to survive.

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As weird as the society is, Joe's value increases because he is literally the one-eyed man in a village of blind people. The President thus gives him the task of solving most of society's problems, resulting in a fun-filled tale that also covers themes such as commercialism, overpopulation, dysgenics, and corporatocracy.

2 A Woman Rewinds The Same Date Night In Meet Cute

Among the more recent offerings in the genre is Meet Cute , where a solution is given to a boring life. Since Sheila's life has become meaningless, she decides to relive the same night multiple times using a time machine.

The movie has its plot weakness, but luckily it has strong witty leads in Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson, who easily cover up any cracks. Numerous strong jokes are exchanged too but what audiences will find more intriguing is how the time travel device plays on social media by enabling the lovebirds to delete and edit sections of their lives.

1 When We First Met Emphasizes On Perfection

Similar to Meet Cute, the Netflix film, When We First Met also focuses on the same date night. However, while the night in the previous film is perfect enough to be revisited again and again, this one is so blemished that the and keeps trying to correct it.

The movie thus provides commentary on modern-day dating and the desperation to impress. Watching the man mess up is funny but watching him go back in time multiple times is inspiring as it highlights the importance of resilience and dedication in everyday life.

NEXT: 10 Good Comedies That Would Have Been Better As Dramas

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Total Recall

15 must-see time travel movies, with mr. peabody & sherman hitting theaters, we run down some of the most memorable journeys across time and space..

Back to the Future

Great Scott! On one hand, Back to the Future is quintessentially 1980s — you’ve got Huey Lewis on the soundtrack, Michael J. Fox in the lead, and a DeLorean for a time machine — but on the other, it’s a charmingly old-fashioned comedy that sends its hero back in time as much to save his own father from growing up to be a schmuck as it does to laugh along with the audience at the many ways in which American pop culture changed between 1955 and 1985. The sequels had their moments, but it’s the original that still really hits the spot; as Adam Smith wrote for Empire Magazine, “To put it bluntly: if you don’t like Back to the Future , it’s difficult to believe that you like films at all.”

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure

Two teenage idiots, George Carlin, and a magic phone booth. They don’t sound like the most likely ingredients for cinematic glory, but then there’s Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure , starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves as our two non-intrepid heroes, a pair of high school buddies destined for greatness — but only if they can pass an upcoming history test. They get a little extra help courtesy of Rufus (Carlin), a citizen of the future utopian society inspired by the music Bill & Ted go on to record, who travels back in time to help them study by giving them some most excellent face time with historical figures like Napoleon, Socrates, Billy the Kid, and Abraham Lincoln. Not the most serious fare ever spun from the time-travel premise, but it works; as Larry Carroll wrote for Counting Down, “This is the rare kind of movie that you could watch along with your kids and actually feel like you’re teaching them something.”

Donnie Darko

Time travel, a falling jet engine, and a dude in a bunny suit: From these disparate ingredients, writer-director Richard Kelly wove the tale of Donnie Darko , a suburban teenager (played by Jake Gyllenhaal) charged with repairing a rift in the fabric of our dimension. Or something. To call Darko “open to interpretation” would be understating the case a bit — it’s been alternately confounding and delighting audiences since it was released in 2001 — but its dense, ambiguous plot found stronger purchase with critics, who cared less about what it all meant than about simply having the chance to see an American movie that took some substantial risks. Though a few reviewers were confused and/or unimpressed (Staci Lynne Wilson of Fantastica Daily called it “derivative,” and Joe Leydon dismissed it as “a discombobulating muddle” in his write-up for the San Francisco Examiner), overall critical opinion proved a harbinger of the cult status the film would eventually enjoy on the home video market; as Thomas Delapa wrote for the Boulder Weekly, “If the sum total of Donnie Darko is hard to figure, there’s no questioning that its separate scenes add up to breathtaking filmmaking.” Despite a paltry $4.1 million gross during its original limited run, Darko returned to theaters in 2004 with a director’s cut — one whose 91 percent Tomatometer actually improved upon the original’s.

Groundhog Day

Under the right circumstances, time travel sounds like quite a bit of fun. Finding yourself trapped in a time loop in Punxsutawney, PA, on the other hand, is a living nightmare — at least for Phil Connors (Bill Murray), the obnoxious newscaster at the heart of director Harold Ramis’ classic 1993 comedy Groundhog Day . But for the audience, Connors’ torment is an invitation to cinematic bliss — first courtesy of Murray’s perfectly deadpan depiction of the callous Connors, then through his progressively more unhinged reaction to the discovery that he’s doomed to repeat the same 24 hours of his life seemingly forever, and then finally in his expected (but no less sweet) moments of self-discovery in the final act. “ Groundhog Day may not be the funniest collaboration between Bill Murray and director Harold Ramis,” admitted the Los Angeles Times’ Kenneth Turan. “Yet this gentle, small-scale effort is easily the most endearing film of both men’s careers, a sweet and amusing surprise package.”

Hot Tub Time Machine

The 1980s got kind of a bum rap at the time, but that hasn’t stopped those of us who grew up during the decade from giving in to nostalgia during the 21st century, or from fetishizing the era’s best films — which is why it was such a winkingly self-referential treat to see 1980s hero John Cusack lead an ensemble cast through Hot Tub Time Machine , director Steve Pink’s ribald comedy about a group of schlubby friends given a surprise chance (via magic hot tub, natch) to revisit the best years of their lives. It’s an unabashedly goofy premise, but screenwriter Josh Heald manages to leave the whimsy with a few dashes of surprising poignancy; as Laremy Legel wrote for Film.com, “Well played, Hot Tub Time Machine , well played. You defied expectations, in a good way, and managed to evolve from ‘potentially silly concept’ to ‘fairly funny film.'”

Plenty of people would love to take the opportunity to travel back in time and see our younger selves, but Rian Johnson’s Looper takes this premise and adds a nasty twist. When a hit man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) realizes his latest quarry is his older self (Bruce Willis) — an event known among his peers as “closing the loop” — he muffs the job, allowing him(self) to escape and setting in motion a high-stakes pursuit that puts a widening circle of people in danger. Tense, funny, and surprisingly heartfelt, Looper may suffer from some of the same scientific story flaws as other time travel movies, but it also manages to turn its by-now-familiar basic ingredients into an uncommonly affecting and thought-provoking sci-fi drama. “ Looper imagines a world just near enough to look familiar,” mused Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, “and just futuristic enough to be chillingly askew.”

Like any genre, science fiction has its share of clichés — and anything relating to time travel probably belongs on that list. But few films have ever dealt with time travel — or the many personal and ethical questions that could arise from ownership of the technology — with the level of intelligence that Shane Carruth’s ultra low-budget Primer brought to the table. The story of two garage scientists who accidentally build a time machine, Primer eschews whiz-bang special effects for a nuts-and-bolts look at the science behind the device, and a cold, hard look at how quickly and easily a friendship can be torn asunder by unchecked power and bottomless greed. It certainly isn’t for everyone — the reams of technical dialogue prompted critics such as the BBC’s Matthew Leyland to dismiss it as “one of the most willfully obscure sci-fi movies ever made” — but if you can absorb the material, it’s uncommonly gripping. Time Out’s Jessica Winter was appreciative, saying “this film imagines its viewers to be smart, possessed of a decent attention span and game for a challenge. It doesn’t happen all that often.”

Somewhere in Time

Time travel has been used as a plot device to set up all kinds of stories, but rarely has it been employed with the sort of three-handkerchief weepie abandon brought to bear on 1980’s Somewhere in Time . Starring Christopher Reeve as a starry-eyed playwright accosted by a mysterious older woman who pleads with him to “come back to me” before pressing a locket into his hand and disappearing, Time slowly morphs into a fantastical tale about coming unmoored in time via self-hypnosis in order to be with the one you love — even if that love is inspired by a portrait of someone you don’t remember ever knowing. A divisive cult classic, Time has always been dismissed by less patient or romantically inclined viewers, but for others, it’s well worth watching. “Above all,” argued Apollo Guide’s Ryan Cracknell, “this film captures a romantic part of the imagination that is often left unexplored.”

Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home

Having explored the outer limits of space, Star Trek spent much of its fourth cinematic installment in decidedly more familiar environs — namely, the America (specifically the San Francisco bay area) of 1986, thanks to a storyline, conceived by returning director Nimoy, that had the crew of the Enterprise traveling 600 years back in time to retrieve a humpback whale in order to… Well, it isn’t important, really; what mattered — at least to the folks who helped Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home to a $133 million worldwide gross — was that it lived up to Nimoy’s goal of showing audiences “a great time” with a feature that played up the lighter side of a franchise whose humor was often overshadowed by its big ideas. Weathering a number of pre-production storms — including William Shatner’s refusal to come back without a raise and the chance to direct the next sequel — Voyage triumphantly emerged as what Roger Ebert referred to as “easily the most absurd of the Star Trek stories — and yet, oddly enough… also the best, the funniest and the most enjoyable in simple human terms.”

The Terminator

It was made with a fraction of the mega-budget gloss that enveloped its sequels, but for many, 1984’s The Terminator remains the pinnacle of the franchise — not to mention one of the most purely enjoyable movies of the last 30 years. Subsequent entries would get a little hard to follow, but the original’s premise was simple enough: A scary-looking cyborg (Schwarzenegger) travels back in time to kill a woman (Linda Hamilton) before she can give birth to the child who will grow up to lead the human resistance against an evil network of sentient machines. Tech noir at its most accessible, Terminator earned universal praise from critics such as Sean Axmaker of Turner Classic Movies, who wrote, “Gritty, clever, breathlessly paced, and dynamic despite the dark shadow of doom cast over the story, this sci-fi thriller remains one of the defining American films of the 1980s.”

Time After Time

What if H.G. Wells really built a time machine — and what if Jack the Ripper used it to flee into the future? That’s the intriguing premise behind Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time , starring Malcolm McDowell as Wells and David Warner as the killer. After Jack travels to 1979, Wells pursues him, setting in motion a cat-and-mouse thriller, culture-clash comedy, and love story all in one, with a dash of sharp social commentary thrown in for good measure. “ Time After Time is still a fun fish-out-of-water flick that deserves more attention than it has received in the thirty years following its release,” wrote Simon Miraudo for Quickflix. “But there’s still plenty of time for that.”

Time Bandits

Terry Gilliam and time travel: A match made in cinematic heaven. Years before he proved it for a second time with the much darker 12 Monkeys , Gilliam directed a far sillier — and visually dazzling — venture into the genre with 1981’s Time Bandits , uniting a stellar cast (including Shelley Duvall, John Cleese, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, and Sean Connery) in service of a deceptively thought-provoking caper about an 11-year-old history buff (Craig Warnock) on a journey through time with a group of dwarves. A solid critical and commercial hit, Bandits proved a favorite for writers like Roger Ebert, who pronounced it “amazingly well-produced” and applauded, “The historic locations are jammed with character and detail. This is the only live-action movie I’ve seen that literally looks like pages out of Heavy Metal magazine.”

In a career dotted with cult classics, 1994’s Timecop manages to stand out as one of the cultiest. And okay, so it’s hard to call a movie that raked in more than $100 million worldwide a “cult” picture — but if you’ve seen the way Timecop takes a cool premise (time travel, natch) and renders it both impenetrably complicated and irrelevant to the action, you know it’s essentially the very definition of the term. (Also, it stars Ron Silver.) The plot is full of holes, but as the filmmakers knew, once you accept the notion of Jean-Claude Van Damme as an officer of the Time Enforcement Commission, you can buy into pretty much anything, and by the time you get to Timecop ‘s final act — in which past and future versions of Van Damme battle past and future versions of Silver — you’ve reached that wonderful place where the laws of logic no longer exist. The highest-grossing movie of Van Damme’s career, Timecop spun off a sequel, a short-lived television show, and even a series of books. Not bad for a movie that Roger Ebert described as “the kind of movie that is best not thought about at all, for that way madness lies.”

The Time Machine

This isn’t the only time Hollywood’s tried adapting H.G. Wells’ classic story, but it’s definitely the best. Starring Rod Taylor as the Victorian time-traveling scientist George and featuring Oscar-winning special effects from Gene Warren and Tim Baar, director George Pal’s version of The Time Machine might seem somewhat quaint by today’s standards; still, whatever it lacks in modern-day visual pizzazz, it more than makes up in the stuff that matters — right down to Wells’ vision of a distant post-human future populated by docile creatures and the monstrous Morlocks who use them for food. It’s “Somewhat dated, and not quite up to the source material,” admitted Luke Y. Thompson of New Times, “but still some good retro fun.”

Any time director Terry Gilliam manages to wrangle one of his films through the studio system, it’s a cause for celebration — and that goes double for a picture like 12 Monkeys , which almost seamlessly weds Gilliam’s signature flights of fancy with good old-fashioned commercialism to produce a knotty time travel story starring a pair of matinee idols (Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt) in an apocalyptic thriller that never stops asking questions — or forcing the audience to answer their own as they hustle to keep up with the unfolding drama. “There’s always overripe method to his madness,” observed Janet Maslin for the New York Times, “but in the new 12 Monkeys Mr. Gilliam’s methods are uncommonly wrenching and strong.”

Take a look through the rest of our Total Recall archives . And don’t forget to check out Mr. Peabody & Sherman .

Finally, here’s what happened when Peabody and Sherman met Ludwig Van Beethoven:

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Time travel isn't just for heady science fiction features. Characters jumping back and forth through the years or stuck in loops can be prime comedic material, too — at least when done right. From oddball slapsticks to rom-coms to fantasy epics, adding a bit of time travel into the mix is guaranteed to stir up trouble.

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H.G. Wells popularized the concept of time travel in his 1897 novella  The Time Machine . Little did Wells know his technological invention would be used decades later to make audiences laugh on the big screen. The best time travel comedies veer from formulaic plots and characterizations to tell unique stories, while the worst rely too heavily upon predictable, cornball genre tropes.

Best: Groundhog Day (1993)

Technically a time loop comedy,  Groundhog Day follows Phil Connor, a cynical TV weatherman played by Bill Murray, who finds himself reliving the titular day over and over again. Murray is hilarious in the role. Andie MacDowell and Chris Elliott make for excellent co-stars in the film, which is directed by Harold Ramis.

Groundhog Day 's influence persists into the present; series like Netflix's  Russian Doll  are clearly indebted to this comedy classic.

Worst: About Time (2013)

Despite its unique premise and genuine acting from Domhnall Gleeson and Rachel McAdams,  About Time is a decidedly bland rom-com. Gleeson plays Tim, a man with the ability to time travel, who uses it to his advantage romantically.

Tim falls for McAdams' character Mary, but happenstance keeps them from forming a lasting bond. In order to fix this, Tim keeps going back to his past to improve his chances of being united with Mary once and for all in the future.

Best: Back To The Future (1985)

Back to the Future may be the most iconic time travel movie ever. Robert Zemeckis blends science fiction, comedy, and action flawlessly in this tale of a high schooler who goes back in time from 1985 to 1955 in his friend Doc Brown's time-traveling DeLorean.

RELATED:  The 10 Best Time Travel Movies According to Rotten Tomatoes

Michael J. Fox plays protagonist Marty McFly, and Christopher Lloyd co-stars as the mad scientist, Doc Brown. Without this film and its sequels, pop culture would be woefully behind in hoverboard technology and deprived of sayings like, "Great Scott!"

Worst: 13 Going On 30 (2004)

Innocent and wholesome,  13 Going on 30 is a time travel comedy about Jenna Rink, 13-year-old girl who wishes she were 30 on her birthday. Jenna Rink wakes up the next morning in a strange New York City apartment to find her wish came true.

Jennifer Garner  plays Jenna at 30, basically portraying a tween trapped in a woman's body. While feelgood vibes abound in the movie, the laughs are few and far between.

Best: Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Directed by  Jurassic World 's Colin Trevorrow,  Safety Not Guaranteed   is an offbeat, entertaining independent comedy. Mark Duplass plays Kenneth Calloway, a Seattle man who posts a classified ad seeking a time-traveling companion.

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Three local magazine employees played by  Aubrey Plaza , Jake Johnson, and Karan Soni decide to investigate the ad. They soon realize that contrary to their original assumption, it may not actually be a hoax after all.

Worst: Click (2006)

One of Adam Sandler's worst comedies ,  C l ick uses a magical remote control as its time-traveling device. Sandler plays an overworked architect named Michael who meets the Angel of Death (whose name is Morty) in a Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

Played by Christopher Walken, Morty gives Michael a universal remote control that allows him to flash forward through bad or boring moments in his life as they happen. Kate Beckinsale co-stars as Michael's wife Donna, whose husband takes his newfound power too far.

Best: Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Many time travel comedies have tried to capitalize on  Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure , a screwball story about two teenage slackers who travel back through time in order to gather historical figures for a high school presentation. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves play the titular duo, who are guided by none other than George Carlin.

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This comedy manages to combine low-brow culture and high-brow ideas to hysterical ends. What other movie contains references to Greek philosophy and  the music of Van Halen?

Worst: Austin Powers In Goldmember (2002)

Despite being extremely popular when they were released, Jay Roach's  Austin Powers movies have not aged well.  Goldmember , the third in the spy comedies starring Mike Myers , features a time travel plot so silly not even Beyoncé can save it.

Dr. Evil, Powers's arch-nemesis who is also played by Myers, plots to go back in time to 1975 in order to bring about the end of the world. Powers follows Dr. Evil to the disco era, where a lot of inane jokes and situational comedy ensues.

Best: Time Bandits (1981)

Part of Terry Gilliam's genre-defying "Trilogy of Imagination,"  Time Bandits joins 1985's  Brazil and 1988's  The Adventures of Baron Munchausen to form an epic fantasy narrative. In  Time Bandits , a young boy named Kevin joins a group of dwarves using a special map that helps them track down holes in the fabric of time.

Kevin's six dwarves use the map to steal treasure from different historical eras. Along the way, they encounter Napoleon, Robin Hood and King Agamemnon – the latter of whom is played by Sean Connery.

Worst: Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

John Cusack, Rob Corddry, and Craig Robinson co-star as three vacationing friends who are sent back in time after a night of heavy drinking in a hot tub. The friends suddenly find themselves in 1986, where disaster meets them around every corner as they try to figure out how to get back to the present.

While  Hot Tub Time Machine is definitely a step above much of the toxic comedies of the time, the film still revels in homophobia and misogyny for cheap laughs. Even with its time travel narrative and talented cast, Hot Tub Time Machine  lacks sustainability.

NEXT:  10 Underrated Time Travel Movies

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The 23 best time travel movies of all time

From Back to the Future to Looper to Palm Springs, the time travel narrative traverses the film spectrum. Here are EW’s picks for 23 of the best. 

Despite time travel being considered more of a science fiction trope, there is something positively enchanting about the idea of being able to go back to another time or forward into the future, even if just for a moment. While this list deals with a mix of films, some of which consider the hazards of time travel (mostly through time loops), for the most part, these films see time travel as a net positive. Time travel is also a sphere that is mostly occupied by television, thanks to shows like Doctor Who , Quantum Leap , and Lost , even though the number of time travel movies has shot up over the past two decades or so.

Unfortunately, the earliest this list goes is 1962; while there are some time travel movies from the Old Hollywood days, they lack a lot of the imagination and thoughtfulness about the nature of time that the movies on this list bring. This list is a mix of straight dramas, killer action, rollicking comedies, and heartfelt romance — and sometimes, all of those elements exist in a single movie. This list is unranked, and mostly grouped together according to each movie's particular "genre" of time travel: conventional time machines, time loops, magical circumstances, and missions to save the past and the future at the same time. These are 23 of the best time travel movies of all time.

La Jetée (1962)

Kicking off an unranked list of time-travel movies chronologically seems like a good place to start, actually. La Jetée is also probably the most experimental of the films on this list. A French Left Bank short film set in a post-nuclear apocalypse future told through narration and photographs, this is not the first time-travel film by any means, but its impact on the time-travel movies that came after, like 1995's 12 Monkeys , cannot be understated.

A young prisoner (Davos Hanich) is forced to undergo torturous experiments to induce time travel by using impactful memories — and unlike those who came before him, he succeeds, but he ends up discovering a time loop in the process. This is an incredibly stylish telling of what is now a familiar type of story, but in 1962, it was absolutely revolutionary. Honestly, because of its unique technical and visual elements, it still is.

Watch La Jetée on Criterion Channel

Time After Time (1979)

Nicholas Meyer is behind not one, but two brilliant time-travel movies that made this list. For this particular film, he not only wrote the screenplay but also made his directorial debut. The tale of two 19th-century former friends, H.G. Wells ( Malcolm McDowell , unusually wide-eyed and adorable) and John Leslie Stevenson a.k.a. Jack the Ripper ( David Warner , never more menacing yet charming), as they chase each other through 1979 San Francisco thanks to Wells' time machine, Time After Time doesn't spend too much time on the science of time travel, and it's better for it.

This is, in essence, a romantic thriller, as Wells falls for quirky bank clerk Amy ( Mary Steenburgen , delightfully independent) while in search of his old friend turned enemy. It has chase scenes, interrogation sequences, gory murder (courtesy of Jack), and a delightful sense of humor as Wells learns to navigate the future. He thought it would be a utopia; instead, he finds a world in sore need of his idealism, kindness, and dedication to justice.

Where to rent or buy Time After Time

The Back to the Future trilogy (1985, 1989, 1990)

While it's true that the first Back to the Future movie is probably one of the greatest time-travel movies of all time, with its two sequels living in its shadows, all three are essential to understanding the character of Marty McFly ( Michael J. Fox ). The Back to the Future trilogy is an '80s version of a bildungsroman about a teenager who has to learn that there's much more to life than being, well, a teenager. The first film, confidently directed by Robert Zemeckis , is imbued with so much humor and heart, it's all too easy to get sucked into a plot that should be convoluted, but that works so awfully well.

Back to the Future Part II evokes a bit less feeling than the original, and it's significantly grittier, but it's still " another fantastic voyage " as EW's Ira Robbins wrote, flinging Marty and Doc Brown ( Christopher Lloyd ) into a slightly prescient future version of 2015. Back to the Future Part III , meanwhile, restores the heart, but its story is slighter as it wraps up Marty's saga, sending Doc off on a brand new adventure all his own. While the first Back to the Future movie is required viewing for any time travel enthusiast, stick around for the rest of the trilogy, too: Even if this franchise's view of time travel is riddled with potential paradoxes, they are entertaining paradoxes nonetheless.

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Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

"Be excellent to each other" is the reigning philosophy of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure , the adventurous, fun-loving, stoner time-travel comedy that spawned a franchise, including a third installment released in 2020. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves absolutely triumph in the roles of lackadaisical teenagers Bill and Ted, respectively, as they journey through time to bring back legends in order to pass their history class.

If the film seems silly, that's because it is meant to be. Whereas the Back to the Future franchise intended to craft a legend, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure kicks off the journey with George Carlin as the duo's time travel guide and mentor, Rufus, who intends to enlighten the pair on their mission and destiny. In any other film, the two budding legends, with their free-wheeling ideals and misadventures, would bring down the fabric of time and space itself. However, Excellent Adventure is not a time-travel film that forces you to think too hard about its premise; instead, it invites you to just kick back and have a good time.

Watch Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure on Amazon Prime Video

Meet the Robinsons (2007)

Meet the Robinsons received mixed reviews when it first debuted, but of the 3-D animated movies that came out of Disney Animation in the 2000s, it's probably the most imaginative and outstanding of the bunch. Following a young orphan as he goes on a fantastic voyage into the future with another young boy who is a time traveler (kind of), Robinsons is stylish to a point and is filled with heart. It's probably also the most kid-friendly entry on this list, but its good-natured humor and complicated emotional palette will appeal to adults, too.

It also fits neatly into a more classic genre of time travel, with time machines, eccentric inventors, and kids looking to make an impact — not just on their time, but on the time they find themselves in, be it the near future or the distant past.

Watch Meet the Robinsons on Disney+

Run Lola Run (1998)

This is, in many ways, the time loop movie; debuting in 1998 to rave reviews, Run Lola Run , a German experimental thriller, is one you will not be able to shake, long after you've finished a viewing (or even a second, to catch what you missed the first time). The protagonist, Lola (Franka Potente, in a punishingly physical performance), is forced to relive a scenario, again and again, involving saving her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) from certain death.

Potente's performance alone is worth the watch, and of the films on this list, Run Lola Run is actually one of the shorter ones, using its 80-minute runtime to its full advantage. The other time loop movies on this list are also worthy viewing experiences in a lot of ways, but for a pure shot of adrenaline, you can't miss the film EW deemed "a masterful pop piece, humming with raw romance, youth, and energy." If you're interested in more of director Tom Tykwer 's work, he also codirected 2012's Cloud Atlas with the Wachowskis , which, while not a pure time-travel movie, certainly plays with the intertwined nature of time and memory.

Where to rent or buy Run Lola Run

Source Code (2011)

Duncan Jones made a splash with his 2009 feature directorial debut Moon , a moody, philosophical insight into possible lunar labor practices in the future. He followed that thoughtful film up with Source Code , which, while not a movie that could always be described as "thoughtful," could certainly be described as moody. Hitchcockian in a sense, Source Code follows the misadventures of a U.S. Army pilot ( Jake Gyllenhaal ), as he attempts to stop a terrorist attack on a Chicago commuter train — repeatedly.

Source Code does have something to say about the commodification of bodies and minds in the service of the so-called "greater good"; while Gyllenhaal's Captain Stevens' services are no doubt helpful, are they necessary, the film asks. Is it really a good idea to force someone to relive an incredibly stressful idea, over and over again? The movie has its funny moments, even in the thick of all the intense chase scenes through the train; EW noted back in 2012, "The director finds moments of humor in unlikely corners of that train of fools." Indeed. If you enjoyed a film like The Commuter (2018), but thought it could use a time loop and the potential of alternate realities, Source Code is your next mandatory viewing.

Watch Source Code on Showtime

Looper (2012)

Before Rian Johnson introduced us to Benoit Blanc or journeyed to a galaxy far, far, away , he made the tangled time-travel film fittingly called Looper . Starring Bruce Willis , Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a younger Bruce Willis, and Emily Blunt , Looper tells the tale of a contract killer sent after his next target: himself. This is a complicated film, and it is imperfect in a lot of ways, but its brutal appraisal of a possible dystopian future, and the efforts one man takes to prevent that future, are worth the amount of head-scratching you might find yourself doing throughout.

That Johnson likes his narratives to be impenetrable Gordian knots that only his designated protagonist can solve can perhaps be frustrating to the audience. However, if there's one thing that the Knives Out franchise seems to have reinforced, it's that not trying to unpack the mysteries of his work might work to your advantage as a viewer, because Johnson will probably have someone explain what just happened by the end, anyway. Like most of his films, Looper has a social conscience lurking within it as well. As EW's Lisa Schwarzbaum noted , "It's time to wipe the drops from our eyes or else get stuck in a loop, an endless cycle, a rut" about Looper 's core tenet back in 2012. It's a worthy takeaway from a film obsessed with self-fulfilling prophecies people find themselves within.

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Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

Time loop movies need some incredible editing in order to really succeed, and Doug Liman 's enthralling Edge of Tomorrow certainly does so on that point. While Tom Cruise is the lead as a cowardly lion–turned–near-super soldier, all eyes are on Emily Blunt as Rita Vrataski, who rules this movie as one of the few heroes this dystopian, post-alien invasion world actually has left. While the quest Cruise and Blunt go on may be a bit convoluted, the film is so incredibly entertaining because it's so sharply cut, keeping up the pace even as we see similar things over and over and over again.

A tip of the hat must, of course, go to the action, which is as compelling as you would expect from a mega-star who seems determined these days to do all of his own stunts. In an era of often depressing science fiction, Edge of Tomorrow , as EW's Chris Nashawaty mentioned , is a fun, "deliciously subversive kind of blockbuster" to immerse your senses in for two hours, if nothing else.

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Interstellar (2014)

While this film might technically be considered more of a space opera than a time-travel movie, there's no reason it can't be both. Christopher Nolan 's Interstellar is a dazzling portrait not just of space travel, but of the love between a father and daughter that stretches over the thin fabric of both time and space. Matthew McConaughey as the astronaut father has never been so serious, but acclaim needs to go to Jessica Chastain and Anne Hathaway as Nolan's strongest women characters to date.

Interstellar varies between being almost too tense to stand, and, at other points, utterly relaxed. As a cinematic experience, it feels all-encompassing, using every possible outstanding special effect to draw its viewers in before the script hits them with emotional truth. While Nolan can certainly be considered " cold and clinical " as EW noted, his space-journeying meditation on the intersection between love and time is anything but.

Watch Interstellar on Paramount+

Palm Springs (2020)

Releasing a time loop movie during a global pandemic where life felt increasingly repetitive and bizarre was certainly a strategy for Hulu and Neon with Palm Springs , but it paid off. While the film was certainly developed long before COVID-19, the scenario of two wedding guests trying to escape the situational loop they've found themselves definitely resonated at the time, and it still does. Palm Springs may seem serious from the above description, but it is actually a fun sci-fi-tinged tale that is largely driven by the comedic skills of leads Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti .

EW noted that the movie avoids " true discomfort comedy ," and honestly, it's all the better for it. If Palm Springs had been angrier, it wouldn't hit home so hard, and it also wouldn't be nearly as entertaining. Instead, it's an often sweet rom-com that doesn't take itself or its completely made-up time loop physics too seriously. It was a Sundance darling for a reason, never quite letting up on the wild ride it takes its characters or its viewers on over the course of its 90 minutes.

Watch Palm Springs on Hulu

Somewhere in Time (1980)

Somewhere in Time might employ one of the strangest methods of time travel of all the movies on this list: time travel by hypnosis, of all things. (And self-induced hypnosis, for that matter.) Time travel on such shaky ground can't possibly hold up, and it somewhat doesn't, in the end. Science fiction great Richard Matheson adapted his own novel into a lackadaisical screenplay for this film, starring Christopher Reeve in a perfectly tragic role as the young man who gives his all for a woman (Jane Seymour) he can never really have.

In many ways, Somewhere in Time feels like a curio of the era from which it came, serving as a time capsule of how stories were told in the late-'70s and early-'80s. That is actually not a mark against it; this is a film that is just a peak tragic romance in a lot of ways; special nods must also go to Christopher Plummer as the young woman's cynical mentor, who seems to possess a certain foresight about the impossibility of Reeve's character. If you want a time-travel movie that is beautifully romantic, from its iconic score to its grand cinematography, you shouldn't stray from Somewhere in Time .

Watch Somewhere in Time on Tubi

Peggy Sue Got Married (1986)

The tale of a grown, about-to-be-divorced woman forced to relive her high school days and her courtship with a dorky-cool musician, Peggy Sue Got Married might be one of Francis Ford Coppola 's most small-scale movies, but it decidedly has the most soul of his catalog of mostly epics. Peggy Sue ( Kathleen Turner , in an Oscar-nominated performance) just wants to leave Charlie (Nicolas Cage) behind, but her time-traveling coma dream conspires against her to force her to reconsider. (It forces Charlie to become a better person, too.)

The film combines the cynicism of a rightfully embittered '80s housewife with the unbridled idealism of a '60s teenager to make one heck of a sincere cinematic concoction. That the film starts at a high school reunion could mean it becomes awkward very quickly, but instead, it's completely joyful. Whether Peggy Sue Got Married started a tradition of "person has some sort of crisis and subsequently ends up in another time" movies is unclear, but it does have a rather clear descendant in one of our next entries.

Where to rent or buy Peggy Sue Got Married

Kate & Leopold (2001)

Doesn't everyone want a young Hugh Jackman from the 19th century to fall out of the sky and into their lives? Leopold (Jackman) is a foppish and geeky, if not perfect, gentleman who quickly has Kate ( Meg Ryan ) falling for him despite her modern understanding of the world. That so many time-travel movies somehow end up in romantic territory is an interesting phenomenon, but one that does make sense. There is something appealing about falling for someone whose time is not your own.

Kate & Leopold is decidedly not a perfect film, although it is the first of director James Mangold 's and Jackman's collaborations (see 2017's Logan for the much grittier future fruits of their labor). It's fluffy, it's light, and it creates a paradox without even really acknowledging it. Someone looked at the Meg Ryan comedies of the '80s and '90s and asked, "But what if we made them science fiction?" It works in spite of itself, with Jackman's physical comedy as he plays " a doll of a boyfriend " and Ryan's sardonic tone carrying the day.

Watch Kate & Leopold on Paramount+

13 Going on 30 (2004)

When a 13-year-old girl is crushed after being tricked at her own birthday party, she makes a wish to be "30, flirty, and thriving," quickly waking up the next day to find herself just that, in the body of Jennifer Garner . Instead of traveling back to the past à la the protagonist of Peggy Sue Got Married , Jenna (Garner, Christa B. Allen) ends up in a potential future, where she is all the things she wished for, but definitely not as happy as she thought she would be.

The 2004 rom-com is a magical time travel tale — there's literally "magic wishing dust" — but that doesn't take away from the hilarity that comes with a 13-year-old trying to navigate an adult woman's life. Of course, in the end, Jenna learns her lesson — it's okay to just be young, for a little bit longer — but the journey she goes on as she discovers not just herself but also her true love ( Mark Ruffalo ) is worth all the silliness in the end.

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Mirai (2018)

This lovely little gem directed by Japanese animation visionary Mamoru Hosoda tells the story of a little boy who unhappily gets a baby sister and ends up learning a lot of lessons about the past and the future. Kun (Moka Kamishiraishi) gets a chance to meet not only the grown, future version of his sister Mirai (Haru Kuroki) but also members of his family at different points in their lives. Mirai is a delightfully imaginative film with some gorgeous animation that contains some " mind-boggling visuals " as EW's Christian Holub pointed out.

It is also a genuinely heartwarming tearjerker; while all ends well for little Kun, the meditations this film offers on the nature of family bonds over the course of multiple generations might just leave you in a state of reflection on your own ties that bind. While many time-travel movies tell their stories from the perspective of youth, few unveil them through the eyes of a rambunctious preschooler, and gaining that perspective, in this case, allows for a truly precious journey.

Where to rent or buy Mirai

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

If you know anything about Star Trek , you know the fourth film is "the one with the whales," but if you don't know anything about the franchise, you probably also know that this one is "the one with the whales." Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home often gets acclaim as the funny Star Trek movie, but it brings a lot more than just comedy. The original crew of the Enterprise fling themselves back in time to save humpback whales in the past in order to save the future from a strange probe that threatens Earth...and will stop, but only if it hears some natural whalesong.

The crew finds themselves in 1986 San Francisco, so it's great that Time After Time's Nicholas Meyer returned to the franchise not as director (he helmed Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ), but as a screenwriter. Watching these characters from a literal utopia navigate a world not designed for them creates not only dynamic humor but great tension as well. As they almost always do, the Enterprise team breaks all the rules in order to save the future as well as the whales. Or, as EW noted in a tribute to the film: "It has heart, and passion — Save the Whales! — and a tremendous sense of fun."

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Star Trek: First Contact (1996)

Star Trek: First Contact doesn't particularly feel as much like a Star Trek movie as Voyage Home does, and EW, in fact, says it harnessed "a sleek, confident style fully independent of its predecessors." As a Trekkie, this may not be the most complimentary way of looking at it, but as a film fan, however, it might be the highest honor someone could bestow upon a movie within this franchise. Captain Jean-Luc Picard ( Patrick Stewart ) turns from a peace-loving diplomat to a Borg-slaying action star while the rest of his crew tries to get the inventor of the Warp Drive (the technology upon which the future relies) to stop drinking so much and actually invent the thing. James Cromwell, as the inventor, Zefram Cochrane, serves as the comedic relief for a remarkably serious and often scary film.

The Borg, '90s Star Trek 's biggest villain, are the main antagonists here, and they do provide some chilling action, even if the introduction that they can easily time travel would really wreck things for some future Trek series. Stewart manages the transition from his mild-mannered diplomat to traumatized warrior well, turning in one of his most ferocious performances. Star Trek: First Contact also gives us a look at a post-apocalyptic world in the midst of a recovery, and in that respect, it makes it both a thoughtful entry in the Trek canon and a time travel action-thriller with a brain.

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The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

What would a best time-travel films list be without including at least one of the Terminator movies? While an often brutal franchise with diminishing returns after James Cameron 's first two installments, the misadventures of an evil cyborg-turned-good (played to physical perfection by Arnold Schwarzenegger ) in a consistently dangerous world are always thrilling and entertaining.

Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, mother of the future's savior (and much, much more), is also due an acknowledgment; while the films are remembered for Schwarzenegger's portrayal of the T-800, Hamilton is the heart of this franchise a great deal of the time, as she refuses to die or let her son face the same fate, either. The first two Terminator films are so much more than "scary robots take over the world, everybody dies" – they're action-packed, bloody thrillers with startling narratives, pioneering visual effects, and, of course, time travel as the catalyst.

Watch The Terminator on Max

Where to rent or buy Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

"Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke...I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED": This is part of the joke classified ad from which this movie was inspired. You might inspire a more risky movie from the tone of the ad, but what you get is a light comedy that served as the first leading film role for Aubrey Plaza . This Colin Trevorrow -directed film isn't so much about time travel as it is about the cultural assumptions that surround the concept, and those who think it might be possible.

In that sense, it's a meta-narrative on nearly every time travel story which has come before it, and quite possibly, that will come after it. EW called it " a fable of 'redemption' "; redemption, and the acts of salvaging something, anything, for the benefit of the future, is a regular time travel theme, from all those time machines to all those time loops. Safety Not Guaranteed manages to explore these themes with a lot of irony and a splash of heart.

Where to rent or buy Safety Not Guaranteed

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• The Terminator movies, ranked
• Back to the Future cast: Where are they now?
• Let's talk about the plot of Interstellar

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The Best Time Travel Comedies, Ranked

The best time-travel comedies hold a special place in the hearts of movie enthusiasts, delivering captivating stories and hilarity in equal measure. These cinematic gems transport viewers through time, exploring the complicated nature of human relationships, life choices, and alternate realities, all while delivering a hearty dose of humor. As the popularity of this genre continues to grow, audiences can expect even more delightful and thought-provoking time travel comedy movies. 

The genius of comedy time-travel movies lies in their ability to delight audiences while simultaneously delving into the intricacies of human existence. Filmmakers have the exceptional ability to intertwine complex theories with relatable life experiences, resulting in comedy time-travel movies that examine the intricacies of married life, friendship, or personal growth. Ultimately, it is this expert combination of raw emotions and laughter that distinguishes these films within the world of cinema. 

Among the collection of best time-travel movies, a few stand out as quintessential examples. Back to the Future , for instance, has become a classic for its witty writing, memorable characters, and the unforgettable DeLorean time machine. Groundhog Day masterfully showcases the comedic genius of Bill Murray in a film that explores the existential implications of living the same day over and over again. Moreover, Back to the Future Part II ingeniously expands upon the original film's concept, offering an exhilarating glimpse into a futuristic world filled with hoverboards and self-tying shoes. 

These notable movies are just a fraction of the incredible lineup of comedy time-travel movies available to moviegoers.  From past to future, the legacy of the best time-travel comedy movies will persist, as they continue to enthrall viewers with delightful narratives and relatable themes. With their ability to provoke laughter, inspire deep reflections, and challenge preconceived notions of reality, these films have found their way into cinematic history. 

Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel

In this comedic sci-fi adventure, three friends find themselves caught up in a wild and unpredictable chronicle of time-travel mishaps after a chance encounter with a mysterious woman at their local pub. As they navigate the perplexing series of events and try to restore order to their lives, the film cleverly explores the absurd and entertaining consequences of meddling with time. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel offers a unique and irreverent take on the time-traveling genre that distinguishes itself through its blend of wit, intrigue, and camaraderie.

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Mr. Peabody & Sherman

This animated adventure brings the beloved characters of the classic 1960s television series to life, as genius dog Mr. Peabody and his adopted human son, Sherman, use their time-traveling WABAC machine to embark on a series of educational and entertaining historical escapades. Along the way, the duo encounters famous figures, rectifies past mistakes, and learns valuable lessons about family and friendship. With its charming animation, clever humor, and heartwarming storyline, Mr. Peabody & Sherman captures the essence of the original series while appealing to a new generation of audiences.

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Black Knight

When lowly theme park employee Jamal Walker, played by Martin Lawrence, is transported back in time to the Middle Ages, he finds himself mistaken for a messenger from God and becomes embroiled in the political intrigue of a royal court. Utilizing his street smarts and contemporary know-how, Jamal shakes up the medieval establishment with uproarious results. With its humorous premise and Lawrence's infectious energy, Black Knight offers an amusing and lighthearted spin on the classic fish-out-of-water tale.

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Slaughterhouse-Five

Adapted from Kurt Vonnegut's iconic novel, this darkly comedic film centers around Billy Pilgrim, a man who becomes "unstuck" in time and experiences his life out of order, from his mundane suburban existence to his harrowing experiences as a prisoner of war during the bombing of Dresden. Directed by George Roy Hill, the film expertly balances its portrayal of the absurdity of life with the inherent tragedy of war, creating a unique viewing experience that is both profound and engaging. Slaughterhouse-Five remains a thought-provoking and poignant exploration of human existence, fate, and the nature of time.

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Woody Allen stars as a hapless health food store owner who, after being cryogenically frozen, awakens two centuries later to find himself in a dystopian police state where he becomes an unlikely hero. This classic sci-fi comedy showcases Allen's trademark wit and physical humor as he lampoons futuristic technology, social norms, and the human propensity for self-destruction. Sleeper 's unique blend of slapstick, satire, and absurdist humor has made it a cult classic that continues to resonate with fans of Allen's distinct comedic style.

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Safety Not Guaranteed

When a team of journalists investigates an eccentric man who claims to have built a time machine, they find themselves drawn into his peculiar world of conspiracy theories and outsider charm. The film, led by breakout performances from Aubrey Plaza and Mark Duplass, masterfully balances its comedic elements with genuine human emotion, resulting in an endearing and thought-provoking examination of trust, connection, and the allure of the unknown. Safety Not Guaranteed has earned its place among contemporary indie comedies as a heartfelt and memorable exploration of the human obsession with altering one's past.

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Hot Tub Time Machine 2

In this raucous sequel, the gang returns for another time-bending adventure when their friend Lou, played by Rob Corddry, is shot and left for dead, prompting them to use the titular hot tub to travel back in time and catch his assailant. The film ups the ante on its predecessor's irreverent humor and outrageous situations, with the ensemble cast once again embracing their roles and the absurdity of their predicament. Though not as well-received as the original, Hot Tub Time Machine 2 offers a dose of nostalgic escapism for fans of the first film who seek more of its unapologetically crude humor.

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When We First Met

In this romantic comedy, Noah, played by Adam DeVine, gains the ability to travel back in time to the night he met the love of his life, only to repeatedly fail at winning her heart with each attempt at altering their history. As Noah desperately tries to rewrite the past, the film cleverly explores themes of love, destiny, and the consequences of meddling with time. With its engaging performances and sweet-natured humor, When We First Met offers a fresh and charming take on the concept of getting a second chance at love.

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Les Visiteurs

This French comedic gem follows a medieval knight and his loyal servant, played by Jean Reno and Christian Clavier, as they are accidentally transported to the 20th century and struggle to adapt to the foreign customs and technologies of the modern world. Through a series of hilarious mishaps and misunderstandings, the duo inadvertently wreaks havoc upon the lives of their descendants. With its memorable characters, clever dialogue, and fish-out-of-water premise, Les Visiteurs has become an enduring favorite among international comedies.

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My Science Project

In this 1980s cult classic, high school student Michael Harlan discovers a strange alien device that inadvertently unleashes a temporal vortex, sending him and his friends hurtling through time. As they navigate their way through a chaotic landscape populated by historical figures and prehistoric creatures, the group must find a way to reverse the damage they've caused before it's too late. Blending teen comedy with science fiction adventure, My Science Project offers a nostalgia-infused romp through time that has delighted audiences for decades.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Adapted from Mark Twain's classic novel, this film stars Bing Crosby as a savvy mechanic who is transported back in time to the court of legendary King Arthur and uses his modern know-how to save the day. Showcasing Crosby's trademark crooning and charm, the film delivers an engaging blend of humor, romance, and adventure that captures the spirit of Twain's original story. With its timeless appeal and witty commentary on the clash between the past and the present, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a delightful addition to the canon of time-traveling comedies.

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In this Japanese romantic drama, a high school student named Naho receives a mysterious letter from herself ten years in the future, urging her to prevent a tragedy involving her classmate Kakeru. As the film delicately interweaves its exploration of adolescence, love, and friendship with the intriguing premise of altering one's past, it offers a poignant and heartfelt viewing experience that resonates with audiences of diverse backgrounds. With its atmospheric visuals, engaging performances, and thoughtful storytelling, Orange stands out among time-traveling narratives as a moving and introspective meditation on the power of human connection.

In this campy horror-comedy, a group of friends stumbles upon a wax museum with a sinister secret: the exhibits are actually trapped souls waiting to be unleashed upon the world. As the friends are drawn into the alternate realities of each exhibit, they must battle the monsters of history and fiction to prevent a supernatural apocalypse. Blending tongue-in-cheek humor with elements of horror and adventure, Waxwork offers a fun and offbeat entry in the genre of time-traveling comedies.

Happy Accidents

This unique romantic comedy stars Marisa Tomei as Ruby, a woman who falls in love with Sam, played by Vincent D'Onofrio, a seemingly ordinary man who claims to be a time traveler from the year 2470 sent back to save her life. As Ruby grapples with the implications of Sam's extraordinary claim, the film deftly explores the boundaries of love, trust, and the mysterious nature of time. Offering an unconventional and thought-provoking take on the traditional romantic comedy, Happy Accidents has earned its place among the most memorable films to tackle the subject.

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Waxwork II: Lost in Time

In this sequel to the cult classic Waxwork , the surviving characters from the original film embark on a time-hopping adventure through various dimensions in order to save the world from an ancient evil. Along the way, they encounter an array of historical figures and notorious villains, all while grappling with the challenges and consequences of time travel. Waxwork II: Lost in Time ups the ante on its predecessor's blend of campy humor and otherworldly adventure, delivering a wildly entertaining romp through the ages.

The Spirit of '76

Set in a grim dystopian future where the history of the United States has been lost, this sci-fi comedy follows three time travelers sent back to the year 1976 in an attempt to rediscover America's past - only to land in the wrong decade. As the trio becomes entangled in the pop culture of the groovy era, they learn more about themselves and the true spirit of America than they ever anticipated. Blending nostalgic humor, quirky characters, and an unapologetic love for the 1970s, The Spirit of '76 offers a light-hearted look at the era that forged a nation's identity.

Just Visiting

An American remake of the popular French comedy Les Visiteurs , this film stars Jean Reno and Christina Applegate as a medieval knight and his 21st-century descendant who must join forces to undo the consequences of a time travel spell gone awry. With its lively mix of slapstick humor, fish-out-of-water scenarios, and culture-clash comedy, Just Visiting continues the tradition of its predecessor while offering new twists and laughs for American audiences.

In this unconventional romantic comedy, a frustrated author discovers the characters she created are living out their lives in an alternate reality, resulting in a collision of worlds as they become aware of their fictional status. As the line between reality and fiction blurs, the characters must navigate the challenges of self-awareness, love, and the ability to rewrite their destinies. With its clever blend of humor, romance, and existential exploration, Meet Cute offers a fresh and imaginative take on the time-honored theme of second chances.

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Meet Cute (2022)

Kaley Cuoco and Pete Davidson co-star in Peacock's Meet Cute , a delightful and often dark rom-com based around time travel. Feeling suicidal, Sheila (Cuoco) finds a time machine in a nail salon and decides to go back in time 24 hours. While re-living her first date with Gary (Davidson) again and again, Sheila loses touch with reality and might have destroyed any chance she had with him.

A Wrinkle in Time (2018)

High schooler Meg Murry travels through time and space in search of her missing astrophysicist father (Chris Pine). On her journey, Meg meets Mrs. Which (Oprah Winfrey), Mrs. Whatsit (Reese Witherspoon), and Mrs. Who (Mindy Kaling), as well as a whole host of dangerous beings.

The Time Traveler's Wife (2009)

Based on Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 novel of the same name, The Time Traveler's Wife tells the story of Henry (Eric Bana), a librarian who is able to randomly travel through time. After meeting Clare (Rachel McAdams) as a child, Henry later develops a romantic relationship with her. HBO's recent adaptation starring Theo James and Rose Leslie has reignited the debate regarding whether or not the story promotes grooming , or if it's a timeless romance.

Back to the Future (1985)

'80s classic Back to the Future has stood the test of time, and spawned two equally entertaining sequels. In the first film, Marty McFly is sent to the 1950s in his friend Doc Brown's time machine, a super cool DeLorean. Marty meets his parents as teenagers, and his presence risks changing history forever.

See You Yesterday (2019)

Netflix's See You Yesterday follows science prodigy C.J. (Eden Duncan-Smith), who invents time traveling backpacks. Along with her best friend Sebastian, C.J. uses her invention to go back in time to stop her brother from being murdered by a racist police officer. However, she's also forced to face up to the limitations and consequences of time travel.

About Time (2013)

Tim (Domhnall Gleeson) inherits the ability to time travel from his father, and decides to use the gift to find love. After a failed attempt at romance, Tim meets Mary (Rachel McAdams), but due to several time travel-related mishaps, romance isn't instantaneous for the pair. Written and directed by rom-com aficionado Richard Curtis.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

James Cameron's follow-up to 1984's The Terminator was a smash-hit that cemented the franchise's popularity. In the sequel, a killer T-1000 Terminator is sent back in time by Skynet to kill the future leader of the resistance, the son of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), John (Edward Furlong). At the same time, the resistance sends a reprogrammed T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) back to protect Connor.

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

Four miserable friends reunite after one of them nearly dies. To cheer themselves up, they decide to spend some time together at a ski resort. Unfortunately, the resort's hot tub isn't what it seems, and they accidentally end up traveling back to 1986. The four friends scramble to find a way back to present day. Starring John Cusack and Craig Robinson.

12 Monkeys (1995)

After a deadly virus destroys humanity in 1996, survivors are forced underground. Decades later, prisoner James (Bruce Willis) agrees to go back in time to find the original virus, so that scientists can work on a cure. However, he arrives too early in 1990, and is promptly institutionalized, where he meets Jeffrey (Brad Pitt), an anti-corporate environmentalist. From there, the mystery only gets more intriguing.

Looper (2012)

In the future, time travel is used by the mob to assassinate people, who are sent back in time and killed by assassins known as "loopers." Joe's (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) older self (Bruce Willis) is sent back to be eliminated, but manages to escape before he is killed. Thus begins a twisty time travel epic, that also stars Emily Blunt.

Tenet (2020)

The Protagonist ( John David Washington ), a former CIA agent, is tasked with stopping World War III. Learning to bend time, he attempts to prevent the destruction of the world. Robert Pattinson and Elizabeth Debicki co-star.

Last Night in Soho (2021)

Aspiring fashion designer Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie) manages to travel back to the 1960s, where she meets singer "Sandie" ( Anya Taylor-Joy ). What starts as a glamorous encounter with the past soon becomings a horrifying nightmare. Co-starring Matt Smith.

Déjà Vu (2006)

A top secret organization has developed the ability to see four days into the past, in order to catch criminals. While hunting a terrorist, ATF agent Doug (Denzel Washington) realizes that this new technology might allow him to stop crimes from happening altogether.

Source Code (2011)

An unusual riff on the time travel movie, Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Army Captain Colter, who is trying to identify the person responsible for bombing a commuter train. Re-living an eight minute re-creation of the moments leading up to the explosion, Colter is stuck in a terrifying loop, until he can solve the mystery.

Mirai (2018)

A young boy called Kun runs away from home, as he feels neglected by his family after the arrival of his little sister, Mirai. Kun accidentally discovers a time travel portal in a magic garden, and is transported into the past, where he meets his mother as a child. Later, he travels to the future, where he finds his sister as an adult, and completely changes his outlook in the process.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Aubrey Plaza stars as an aspiring journalist whose latest assignment involves a mysterious classified ad about time travel. "You'll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED," the ad reads. Mark Duplass co-stars.

Groundhog Day (1993)

Although Groundhog Day is technically a "time loop" movie, it wouldn't feel right to leave it off the list. Phil (Bill Murray) is a disgruntled weatherman sent to cover the annual Groundhog Day event in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. When he wakes up the next day, he realizes that he's re-living February 2, which happens again and again, until he figures out how to stop it.

Needle in a Timestack (2021)

The wonderful Cynthia Erivo stars alongside Orlando Bloom, Leslie Odom Jr., and Freida Pinto in this romantic sci-fi flick. In the future, the wealthy are able to partake in "time jaunting," but the ripples from these changes often cause timelines to warp and change. Needle in a Timestack focuses on a happily married couple whose relationship is jeopardized by an ex intent on changing history.

The Lake House (2006)

Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves star in this completely cheesy but endlessly loveable rom-com that defies time. Architect Alex (Reeves) and doctor Kate (Bullock) write letters to one another via a mailbox at a lake house where they both live at separate times. Despite the time difference, they're able to communicate with one another and forge a relationship via this magical postal system that transcends time.

Predestination (2015)

Ethan Hawke stars as an agent tasked with stopping a deadly attack before it happens, via time travel. Traveling back to 1975, he attempts to find and stop a bomber in New York, but his mission is far from simple. When he returns to the future, his life only gets more complicated.

Amy Mackelden is a freelance writer, editor, and disability activist. Her bylines include Harper's BAZAAR, Nicki Swift, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, ELLE, The Independent, Bustle, Healthline, and HelloGiggles. She co-edited The Emma Press Anthology of Illness , and previously spent all of her money on Kylie Cosmetics.

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Future Tense: The 20 Best Time-Travel Movies

By Gavin Edwards

Gavin Edwards

“Time travel hasn’t been invented yet. But it will be,” Joseph Gordon-Levitt says at the beginning of  Looper. That’s the thing about time travel: Once you invent a time machine, you just have to use it to travel back to the U.S. Patent Office on the first day it opened, so you can register your invention and serve as inspiration for an endless stream of movies. For decades, Hollywood has been treating the space-time continuum like it’s just the daily rushes for editors to cut together.

Over the past few summers, for example, X-Men: Days of Future Past sends Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine back in time 50 years, while Edge of Tomorrow puts Tom Cruise in a temporal loop, letting him relive the same battle over and over. So crank up your flux capacitor and check out 20 of the best time-travel movies.

[Editor’s Note: A version of this list was originally published in 2014]

‘Donnie Darko’ (2001)

“Do you believe in time travel?” Jake Gyllenhaal, in his breakout role, plays a disturbed teenager who starts getting warnings about the end of the world from a guy in a rabbit costume. This cult film by Richard Kelly is a puzzle about alternate universes and suburban vortexes; no matter which cut you watch, you still get a moody, trippy slice of high-school alienation and the best use ever of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.”

‘The Lake House’ (2006)

This romance scores by having one of the weirdest time-travel gimmicks ever: Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock send letters to each other via a mailbox at a rental house — even though she is writing and reading them exactly two years after he is. (Many time-travel movies don’t make sense if you think about them too hard; this one doesn’t make sense if you have an autonomic nervous system.) Reeves and Bullock are appealing together, although it seems like a missed opportunity not to put them on a bus that, should it go over or under 50 mph, travels back to the Renaissance Era or something.

‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’ (2004)

The best Harry Potter movie happens to be the one with the most time travel. Coincidence? Hermione has been granted special permission to use a Time Turner because she wants more hours in the day to take a heavier courseload. But the climax of the story is Hermione and Harry’s mission back in time a few hours to save Sirius Black and a hippogriff — revising what we’ve seen before like a crack film editor splicing in new material with Final Cut Pro.

‘Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me’ (1999)

In the second installment of Mike Myers’ James Bond spoof, groovy secret agent Austin Powers has to go back to his native environment, the swinging Sixties, in pursuit of Dr. Evil. Since Powers goes cross-eyed (literally) when he tries to consider time-travel paradoxes, nobody in the movie takes the premise too seriously. Austin’s description of the 1990s to Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham): “Everyone has their own flying car, entire meals come in pill form, and the Earth is run by damn dirty apes.”

‘The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey’ (1988)

Trying to escape the Black Plague in 1348, English villagers dig a tunnel and end up in 20th-century New Zealand, switching from black-and-white to color like Dorothy traveling to Oz. (If you object to the notion of 14th-century villagers finding a way to travel forward in time 600 years…well, in the present day, we haven’t invented time machines either.) Suffused with surrealism and religious faith, the movie succeeds in making clear how strange our modern world actually is.

‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ (1986)

This Francis Ford Coppola movie, dismissed by some as a rehash of Back to the Future ( both feature a protagonist traveling back to the doo-wop era) is actually a small gem, rueful and thoughtful. Kathleen Turner finds herself transported back to 1960, her senior year of high school, trying to figure out how her choices as a teenager helped form her identity as an adult — and hoping she can turn “She Loves You” into a hit before Lennon and McCartney get around to writing it.

‘Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure’ (1989)

There are many other goofy time-machine journeys through the past, from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to Mr. Peabody & Sherman;  none of those, however, have brilliantly slack-jawed performances by Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves. The premise: Two SoCal teens need to locate famous figures of Western civilization so they won’t fail history and their band, the Wyld Stallyns, can stay together and become the musical foundation of a future utopia. The most inspirational moment comes when Ted (Reeves) philosophizes with Socrates by quoting Kansas: “All we are is dust in the wind, dude.”

‘Safety Not Guaranteed’ (2012)

Mark Duplass plays the grocery clerk who’s invented a time machine and places a classified ad looking for somebody to travel back in time with him; Aubrey Plaza plays the magazine intern who shows up on an assignment to investigate that ad. Guess who forges an unlikely connection? This indie movie explores the enduring fantasy of time travel: you get to live your life again, only better. What gives the film life — aside from great performances by Duplass and Plaza — is that it’s not clear until the end whether they’re indulging that fantasy, or whether his time machine actually works.

‘Galaxy Quest’ (1999)

You may remember Galaxy Quest as a genius Star Trek parody featuring the cast of a cheesy outer-space TV show (Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman) thrust into a real interstellar adventure — and not as a time-travel movie. But one of the central pieces of technology in the film is the Omega 13 device, which turns out to be a time machine, albeit not a particularly flexible one: It sends its user 13 seconds into the past. That may be the smallest increment of time travel in any movie, but it turns out to be just enough time to save the day.

‘Planet of the Apes’ (1968)

If you need a spoiler alert for a 45-year-old movie with one of the most famous plot twists in history, you may want to build your own time machine and head back to an era before this movie was released. (Remember to bring your copy of Grays Sports Almanac. ) Everyone else knows that the brilliance of the Statue of Liberty scene is the revelation that yes, this Charlton Heston sci-fi classic is actually a time-travel movie: Charlton Heston’s astronaut has not journeyed to a galaxy far, far away, but only two millennia into Earth’s future. (The time-travel elements of the franchise became even more pronounced in the sequels: in 1971’s Escape from the Planet of the Apes, three future apes travel back to 1973 and end up testifying at a presidential commission.)

‘Time Bandits’ (1981)

Terry Gilliam’s relentlessly inventive time-travel caper stars a young boy and six dwarfs who have swiped a map of the universe and are using it to steal everything they can. Best cameos: Sean Connery as Agamemnon and John Cleese as a daffily aristocratic Robin Hood. God was played by the distinguished British actor Ralph Richardson, who got so into the role that he rejected some of his dialogue, telling Gilliam, “God wouldn’t say that.”

‘Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home’ (1986)

The Star Trek franchise, both on TV and on the big screen, has featured so many time-travel stories, working every possible angle, that eventually the Deep Space Nine show had to introduce a Department of Temporal Investigations just to keep everything straight. This romp was one of Starfleet’s best journeys through time: Kirk and the Enterprise crew head to 1980s San Francisco to bring a humpback whale to the future, and are befuddled by 20th-century concepts such as punk rock, computer keyboards, and exact change.

‘Run Lola Run’ (1998)

The crimson-haired Lola (Franka Potente) gets a phone call from her boyfriend: He’s lost a bag with 100,000 deutschemarks, and if he doesn’t find it or replace it in the next 20 minutes, his criminal boss will kill him. So Lola runs through Berlin, dodging bicyclists, causing car accidents, provoking flash-forward sequences of the destiny of various pedestrians, trying to find a way out. Each time she fails, the 20-minute time loop starts again — it seems to be powered by love and the absence of cash.

‘Hot Tub Time Machine’ (2010)

Probably the funniest time-travel movie ever made: John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, and Clark Duke head back to the 1980s while at a ski resort, revisiting a time when hair was big, outerwear was neon, and Poison was a big headlining band. (It’s also a time when Cusack was a much bigger movie star; the movie sidesteps that.) Best scene: Robinson having sex in a bathtub so he won’t disrupt the timeline, weeping because he feels guilty about cheating on his wife, even though she’s only nine years old in 1986.

‘Looper’ (2012)

“I’m a sucker for the time-travel genre,” director Rian Johnson told Rolling Stone. “If you’re a nerd like I am, it’s really fun to work out the map of how everything is going to work.” But he made sure this movie, about contract killers snuffing people sent back in time 30 years, didn’t feel like “algebra homework”;  instead, Looper has an aging hitman (Bruce Willis) confronting his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). For all its sci-fi inventiveness and thrills, the best scene is the two leads meeting at a diner: a young man looking his older self in the eye, determined not to turn into him.

‘Primer’ (2004)

A rigorous, graduate-level time-travel movie, full of confusing plot twists, technical jargon, and duplicate versions of characters trying to outfox each other. But it’s also a thrilling mind-bender, and as soon as you’re done watching it, you want to see the whole thing again to see if it actually makes sense. (It does). Made for an astonishingly low $7,000, director Shane Carruth’s debut is also one of the best movies ever about a tech start-up: When some engineer friends make a working time machine, they skip right over the ethical consequences in favor of the financial rewards.

‘Back to the Future’ (1985)

Funny, thrilling, unbelievably Oedipal: When Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) travels to 1955 and accidentally prevents his parents from getting together, his mother transfers her affections to him instead. Fortunately, Fox doesn’t have to pluck out his eyes — instead, he labors to make his parents fall in love, so that he will actually be born. Best subtle joke: McFly knocks down a tree in 1955; back in 1985, a shopping center has changed its name from the Twin Pines Mall to the Lone Pine Mall.

‘Terminator 2: Judgement Day’ (1991)

The original Terminator (1984) had a great premise: Arnold Schwarzenegger is a killer cyborg (just the way you like him) coming from the future to kill waitress Linda Hamilton so she can’t give birth to the eventual leader of the human resistance. But seven years later, director James Cameron upped the stakes with this sequel — not just blowing out retinas with bigger explosions and more CGI, but wrestling with the philosophical paradox of whether knowing the future removes humanity’s free will.

‘La Jetée’ (1962)

A gorgeous 28-minute film, told in a montage of black-and-white still photographs and narrated in French, about a man sent back in time to avert an apocalyptic war. He’s obsessed with his childhood memories of a beautiful woman and seeing a man die — inevitably, he gets tangled in the silken cords of time travel. This novella of a movie is pretty much perfect, which didn’t stop Hollywood from making a big-budget feature-length version: 12 Monkeys  (1995), directed by Terry Gilliam, and starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.

‘Groundhog Day’ (1993)

Time travel doesn’t have to span hundreds of years to be a significant plot element in a movie, of course: it can be hours, or a handful of seconds. Characters can be caught in a loop, or spawn alternate universes, or even kill their grandfathers, depending on the rules the filmmakers set up: at press time, actual time travel was still fictional. The time travel in this Bill Murray comedy, while limited to a single day, still plays into one of the most fundamental reasons for its persistence: the notion that if we had a chance to do our lives over, we could do it better the second time. The movie’s great subversion of that fantasy is the lesson that you could begin your do-over right now, in the present tense, on February 3rd and beyond.

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The 25 Greatest Time-Travel Movies Ever Made

It must say something, surely, about humans, how often time-travel movies are about returning to the past rather than jumping to the future. As Mark Duplass’s forlorn character says in Safety Not Guaranteed , “The mission has to do with regret.” With all the potential to explore the unknown world of the future, so often when our minds conspire to bend the rules of time it’s instead to rehash the old. It’s compelling to watch a character in a movie do what we cannot — right past wrongs or uncover the reason for or meaning behind the events in their lives, whether they be emotionally catastrophic or merely geopolitically motivated.

So absent is the future from the canon, in fact, that when it is involved, typically future dwellers are leaving their own time to come back to the present. Back to the Future Part II aside, it seems as if there’s something about going forward in time that just doesn’t track for humans. (Of course, you could argue that this is because the present-day concept of bidirectional time travel would infinitely multiply or change beyond recognition any future that may occur, but that’s a knot for another article.)

In any case, the time-travel stories deemed worthy of Hollywood budgets aren’t always straightforward in their mechanics. Some films on this list barely qualify as time-travel movies at all; others could hardly qualify as anything else. There are movies about trips through time but also ones about the bending and fracturing and muddying thereof; then there are those about, as Andy Samberg aptly puts it in Palm Springs , “one of those infinite time-loop situations you might have heard about.” There’s even a movie in which we get only 13 seconds’ worth of time travel, when it functions more like a joke whose punch line hits at the film’s climax.

What these films all do have in common is a fascination with changing the way time works. That being said, the list leaves out movies in larger, more extended franchises in which time meddling is a one-off dalliance thrown into a sequel with little by way of foreshadowing: think Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban , Avengers: Endgame , and Men in Black III . (It also leaves off perhaps the Ur-time-travel movie, Primer , and the quite good Midnight in Paris because their directors don’t deserve the column inches.) We’re looking at self-contained stories using time mechanics from the start, with preference given to those that involve themselves more intently with the ins and outs of time travel; that ask questions about time, aging, memory and so forth; and that try to succeed at it in new and interesting ways. So let’s get to it.

25. Galaxy Quest (1999)

Does Galaxy Quest really count as a time-travel movie? Some compelling reasons argue that it doesn’t: Time travel isn’t a major factor in the plot, and the time traveling that does occur is, yes, only a 13-second jump. But its use of time travel is meaningful insofar as the movie itself is a loving spoof of Star Trek , which makes use of time travel in three films ( one of which made this list ), not to mention dozens of episodes across its various TV iterations. Tacking on time travel as a deus ex machina for the actors in a Star Trek– like show pressed into service as an actual space crew by an endangered alien race is the exact right amount of ribbing in a movie that’s as on point as it is hilarious.

Galaxy Quest is available to rent on Amazon .

24. Happy Death Day (2017)

Pick away at the surface of a time-loop movie and you find a horror movie. Most of the entries on this list are covered in enough feel-good spin to land as comedies, but Happy Death Day stares the horror of the time-loop phenomenon right in the face. (It’s also quite funny.) Reliving the same day over and over is an unimaginably potent form of psychological torture, and adding murder to the equation does little to dull that edge. The film follows a college-age protagonist struggling to escape from a masked slasher hell-bent on killing her again and again while she tries to solve the mystery of how she got stuck in a time loop.

Happy Death Day is available to rent on Amazon .

23. Back to the Future Part II (1989)

Seriously, this may be the only good movie in which the film’s whole focus is using a time machine to travel into the future. The fact that it’s a sequel is telling — the characters already traveled into the past in the first movie , and the filmmakers decided to save “traveling even further into the past“ for the third film in the trilogy. Still, Back to the Future Part II is a fun time that makes great use of sight gags and references, recasting scenes from the first film in the distant future year of 2015 with all its hoverboards and self-lacing Nikes.

Back to the Future Part II is available to rent on Amazon .

22. See You Yesterday (2019)

It’s a dirty little secret of time-travel movies that they tend to be, well, pretty white. Tenet ’s Protagonist aside, if Hollywood’s sending someone through time, they’re almost certainly not a Black person, and for obvious reasons: Most of post-contact North American history is deeply unfriendly to people of color, and the problems a person running around out of time and place is going to encounter are deeply compounded if they’ll likely be the target of racist abuse or violence — which makes See You Yesterday all the more compelling. Produced by Spike Lee and featuring one of filmdom’s most famous time travelers in a cameo role, it follows a Black teenage science prodigy who uses a time machine to try to save her brother from being killed by a police officer.

See You Yesterday is streaming on Netflix .

21. Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

No offense to the Back to the Future franchise, but time travel never looks more fun on film than it does in the first Bill & Ted movie. It’s a concept that feels distinctly of a different era, so pure is its zaniness, that it’s hard to imagine anyone concocting it today. The titular duo, Californian high-school students in the ’80s, travel through the past looking for historical figures in order to ace a history project, then bring them all back to the present. High jinks ensue! We get Genghis Khan in a sporting-goods store and Mozart on an electric keyboard. What more could you want?

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure is streaming on HBO Max .

20. Source Code (2011)

Time-travel-film aficionados know this won’t be Jake Gyllenhaal’s only stop on this list, but no matter. Source Code finds him repeating the same eight minutes over and over as he struggles to find the culprit in a train bombing — with each replay ending in his own death by explosion. For some reason, a romantic subplot is shoehorned into this, along with a bunch of frankly unnecessary technical mumbo-jumbo, but the core idea is a compelling mix of the time-loop movie and the train whodunit that Gyllenhaal is a perfect fit for.

Source Code is available to rent on Amazon .

19. 12 Monkeys (1995)

Some sort of law of nature dictates that every genuinely good idea and/or piece of true art has to at some point be turned into a Hollywood movie. Thank God La Jetée was adapted into something that can stand on its own feet artistically. 12 Monkeys may not retain its source material’s black-and-white look or stripped-down, static-image presentation, but it is a rollicking good time nonetheless. That’s in no small part due to director Terry Gilliam getting the best out of Bruce Willis and a young Brad Pitt, and recasting World War III as a planet-decimating virus. Which, like at least one other movie on this list , “speaks to the present moment,” or whatever.

12 Monkeys is available to rent on Amazon .

18. Run Lola Run (1998)

Unlike almost all of the other films on this list, the terms time travel and time machine don’t show up anywhere in Run Lola Run . Rather, it’s a sort of de facto time-loop scenario in which the protagonist tries repeatedly to pay a ransom to save her boyfriend’s life. In fact, if not for a few key details, it could easily be characterized (and often has been) as an alternate-endings movie rather than a time-travel film. But the fact that Lola seems to be learning from her past attempts with each successive one suggests that she is, indeed, using knowledge gained from previous loops to bring a satisfactory end to this situation.

Run Lola Run is available to rent on Amazon .

17. Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

One of the most striking things about Groundhog Day is the mutability and replicability of its core conceit. Perhaps the best case in point is Edge of Tomorrow , sometimes known as Live. Die. Repeat. after its original tagline. It’s the kind of physically grueling movie only an actor as genuinely unhinged as Tom Cruise could pull off. A noncombatant thrust into a war against invading aliens, Cruise’s character finds himself reliving day one of combat over and over, slowly but surely refining his techniques in order to survive the extraterrestrial onslaught. Like the central twosome in the much less violent Palm Springs , he winds up with a partner in (war) crime, teaming up with the similarly time-trapped Emily Blunt, and the explanation for the replay glitch here is actually pretty satisfying.

Edge of Tomorrow is streaming on Fubo TV .

16. Star Trek (2009)

If you could create some sort of an advanced stat to measure controversy generated per unit of interesting filmmaking decisions, J.J. Abrams would have to be near the top in terms of his ability to rig up movie drama from almost nothing. This is a guy whose filmography is like Godzilla rip-off, Spielberg homage, safe reboot of cherished IP, repeat. Star Trek may be his best film, though, a sure-footed reinvention of a dorky sci-fi franchise that made it, well, cool. Somehow, the beauty of Spock and Kirk’s bromance being woven through chance encounters with future selves kind of … works?

Star Trek is available to rent on Amazon .

15. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)

There’s a relative dearth of time travel in animated film, which perhaps is a function simply of the fact that it’s less impressive to stage in a world that’s already unreal. If you can Looney Tunes your way through physics, what’s so special about grabbing the flow of time and tying it into a bow? Still, the original Girl Who Leapt Through Time deserves mention here. It’s a beautiful story that interlaces the complexity of time leaping with the intensity of teenage emotion and the thorny process of growing up where the opportunity to redo things leads, over time, to growth — a less shitty Groundhog Day , in a way.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is available to rent on Amazon .

14. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

She may not be the most famous, decorated, or emulated actress of her generation, but Aubrey Plaza is someone whose personality spoke to the irony-soaked 2010s in a way that simply could not be denied. Her character on Parks and Recreation , April Ludgate, was, by all accounts, created specifically to channel Plaza’s real-life personality to the screen, and she plays essentially the same character in Safety Not Guaranteed . Here, she’s a sarcastic intern at a magazine working on a story about a would-be time traveler and using her feminine wiles to slowly gain his trust. The chemistry between Plaza and Mark Duplass is probably the film’s high point; the subplot about the FBI feels like it was clipped out of a bad X-Files episode.

Safety Not Guaranteed is streaming on Tubi .

13. La Jetée (1962)

At only a 28-minute run time, La Jetée is arguably too short to merit inclusion on this list. However, what it lacks in content (and in, well, moving images; it’s almost exclusively a collection of static black-and-white shots set to voice-over), it more than makes up for in inventiveness and influence, and it would be a travesty to leave it out in favor of more recent by-the-book fare. Tracing the tale of a man held prisoner in post-WWIII Paris being used in time-travel experiments as his captors seek to remedy the postapocalyptic state of the world, he’s sent into both the future and the past and ends up unraveling a lifelong personal mystery while he’s at it.

La Jetée is streaming on the Criterion Channel .

12. Planet of the Apes (1968)

Unlike the worse but more straightforwardly time-traveling Tim Burton remake, the relationship between the original Planet of the Apes and time travel is inexact — technically, the astronaut crew that lands on the titular planet does travel forward 2,000 years, but it’s not done via a time machine. The travel isn’t instantaneous: It literally does take them 2,000 years to get there; they’re just unconscious and on life support. Still, the way the film’s ending handles the iconic reveal is exactly in line with the best of the time-travel canon, the telescoping, mise en abyme feeling of the world shifting in front of your very eyes without your moving an inch.

Planet of the Apes is available to rent on Amazon .

11. Groundhog Day (1993)

The famous Bill Murray vehicle essentially invented the infinite-time-loop genre (and it’s hardly a movie that succeeds on the strength of its concept alone), but the idea at its core is so steeped in the casual misogyny of late-’80s and early-’90s cinema that it’s hard to watch today without cringing. Murray’s character employing what amounts to PUA-style techniques over and over and over in a desperate bid to fuck his hapless co-worker just doesn’t hit the way it did back then. If the story arc didn’t present a guy detoxifying himself of the worst aspects of masculinity in order to be worthy of a woman’s love as the primary way for a 20th-century white man to achieve full personhood, this would be much higher on the list.

Groundhog Day is streaming on Starz .

10. Predestination (2014)

This is probably the most complicated film on the list. Following a “temporal agent” (played by Ethan Hawke) who’s trying to prevent a bombing in 1970s New York, it’s based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story and features Shiv Roy herself, Sarah Snook, in a star-making turn as someone with a complicated backstory and a secret. Like the best sci-fi, the film’s premise raises all kinds of fascinating questions about the titular concept and throws in some interesting musings on sex, gender, and the self in the process.

Predestination is streaming on Tubi .

9. Looper (2012)

Wes Anderson gets a lot of flak for his overwrought twee visuals, but Rian Johnson has a knack for making movies that feel and function like dioramas even if they don’t look it. Narratively speaking, everything here is constructed just so — and there’s a certain beauty in that — but who ever had a profound experience of art by looking at a diorama? Looper was probably Johnson’s least precious pre– Star Wars film, which is nice because the temptation to drastically overmaneuver the mechanics of a time-travel story can lead to disaster. The tech used to Bruce Willis–ify Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s face is distracting, and the third act’s retreat from the postapocalyptic city of the future to the postapocalyptic corn farm of the future is a brave choice that the film struggles to land. Still, Johnson’s vision of a future in which organized crime runs time travel is compelling and well worth a watch.

Looper is streaming on Netflix .

8. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a bit of a genre mash-up. Part high-school movie, part sci-fi flick, part bleak meditation on the soullessness of late-’80s America, it’s nevertheless a weirdly successful piece of filmmaking that makes fantastic use of a young Jake Gyllenhaal, a great supporting cast (Maggie Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone, and Patrick Swayze among others), and an absolutely iconic haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” Watching high schoolers navigate parallel universes, wormholes, and time travel is a dicey proposition, but director Richard Kelly makes it work, somehow.

Donnie Darko is streaming on HBO Max .

7. Back to the Future (1984)

While it’s clearly superior to the sequel (and leagues ahead of the final film in the trilogy), the original Back to the Future is a bit of a mess (John Mulaney was right , to be honest). Its racial and gender politics are cringey, and the incest subplot is weird (“It’s your cousin Marvin. Marvin Pornhub . You know that new plot element you’ve been looking for?”), but there’s a clear interest in time travel beyond its shimmering surface: the very real addressing of the “grandfather problem” in time travel via the slow disappearance of Marty from his family photo, the accidental invention of rock music, and a genuine curiosity about the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of time machines. Ahh, what the hell. It’s a romp.

Back to the Future is available to rent on Amazon .

6. Palm Springs (2020)

No offense to Gen-Xers and boomers, but the best time-loop movie of all time is Palm Springs . The film isn’t without its missteps, but it’s much more curious about life than Groundhog Day was through the eyes of Murray’s misanthrope. Cristin Milioti and Andy Samberg‘s characters, stuck in the loop together, are a perfect comedic match, and their shared humanity makes for a beautiful arc. The film raises questions about what’s worth doing in life when nothing lasts and how to stay sane when every day is the same. Of course, as a sort of polar opposite of Tenet , it benefited from coming out during the pandemic by speaking, as it does, to the experience of lockdown.

Palm Springs is streaming on Hulu .

5. Tenet (2020)

Interstellar wasn’t enough for Chris Nolan, apparently. Tenet ’s legacy may end up being little more than that of the COVID action movie no one saw — a bloated thriller that Nolan fought to get into theaters and bar from home viewing reportedly to swell the size of his own pockets. It really did suffer from bad timing, though, because this is genuinely a quintessential big-screen popcorn movie whose absurdity is all the more palatable when it’s given the audiovisual bombast it deserves. Ambitious in scope as it traces a war on the past by the future (yes, you read that right), Tenet is as enamored of action tropes as it is in bucking them, and its investment in rendering visible the brain-bendingly knotty mechanics of moving through time is laudable, even when the movie itself remains opaque — as impenetrable as the future, as hazy as the past.

Tenet is streaming on HBO Max .

4. The Terminator (1984)

A partner to Blade Runner in the mid-’80s invention of sci-fi noir, The Terminator is a stunning film in many ways, despite the third act’s now-iffy visual effects. While it’s not James Cameron’s debut, and it would go on to be bested by its sequel , it functions as an incredible showcase for an emerging young director who would exclusively make big stories for the rest of his career. Arnold Schwarzenegger is perfectly cast as the relentless, unemotional killer cyborg sent back from the future to terminate the mother of the eventual resistance leader, and the film’s romantic subplot has just the perfect amount of time-travel-induced cheesiness for it to work.

The Terminator is streaming on Amazon Prime Video .

3. Interstellar (2014)

It’s not inaccurate to say Christopher Nolan is a director who’s more interested in scale and scope than in expressing the minutiae of the human experience in its purest form. But in Interstellar, a Nolan movie in its titular ambitions, there’s a core element of time travel wrought not as sci-fi fireworks but as a paean to the sheer force and will of the power of love. It both does and doesn’t work, depending on your capacity for cheese in space, but even besides that, Nolan’s use of time as story arc — the way Miller’s planet functions, in particular — is conceptually masterful in the best kind of time-travel-movie way.

Interstellar is streaming on Paramount+ .

2. Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)

Whereas the franchise’s first movie spends more time on the question of time travel, in the second it takes a bit of a back seat to the action itself. It’s hard to fault director James Cameron for this decision; T2 remains one of the best action movies of the ’90s and — along with Jurassic Park and The Matrix — one of the decade’s best when for special effects. The groundbreaking T-1000 would honestly be enough to get this movie on the list; a tween John Connor grappling with questions of predestination and the fact that he is vicariously responsible for his own conception feel almost like icing on the time-travel cake. Much as in 12 Monkeys , time travel here is mistaken for delusion, as valiant Sarah Connor, in a Cassandra-esque nightmare, has to battle against the future only she knows is coming. Of course, Cassandra never had access to any firepower stored in underground desert arsenals.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is streaming on Netflix .

1. Arrival (2016)

It’s fair to wonder whether Arrival really is, in fact, a time-travel movie. The Ted Chiang short story it’s based on isn’t about time travel per se; rather, it’s an exploration of alternate forms of temporal understanding. The linguist protagonist, played by Amy Adams, doesn’t travel through time so much as come to experience it differently. Still, the plot ends up hinging on foreknowledge that she is granted not via visions but by actually experiencing her future simultaneously with her present and past. For our purposes, though, that’s time fuckery enough to merit inclusion, and boy howdy does the film deliver in overall quality. Partly, that’s simply a question of the source material. Chiang is arguably the most talented (and possibly the most decorated) American sci-fi writer of his generation. But the source story is not especially Hollywood friendly, and director Denis Villeneuve has adopted it lovingly, borrowing a plot device from another of Chiang’s stories, the more straightforwardly time-travel-based “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” in order to add some third-act blockbuster flavor. The result is a beautiful meditation on love, choice, and courage that packs art-film ethos into a genuine sci-fi blockbuster.

Arrival is streaming on Hulu and Paramount+ .

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100+ Best Time Travel Movies

A list of the best time travel movies from the 1940s to the 2020s.

Table of Contents

Time travel movies fascinate us.

Playing with the laws of time is more than an amusing plot device. It’s also a method of covering important themes of redemption, morality, progress, and our place in the universe.

Paradoxically, at the heart of most time travel films — indeed, a fantastical genre if there ever was one — are real and practical questions such as:

• Can we overcome our past mistakes?
• How do we break vicious habits?
• How do our actions affect future generations?
• Is love eternal?
• How much of our reality in an illusion?
• Is it too late? Can we alter fate?

Here we’ll survey the whole time span of time travel films throughout Hollywood history and how these movies address those questions above. Let’s move through time!

Old Time Travel Movies

A connecticut yankee in king arthur’s court (1948).

Based on a Mark Twain novel from 1889, A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court is a funny musical about time travel. It stars Bing Crosby — the 1900s singer most famous for his rendition of “White Christmas” — as a mechanic who in the year 1912 bumps his head on a crowbar and is thrown back to Britain in the year 528 AD. Film critics generally agree it is the first time travel movie ever made. In terms of historical importance, it’s a whimsical story that works because it plays off fun and universal fantasy: What kind of chaos and fun would you have if you could travel in time? Bing Crosby shows us.

The Time Machine (1960)

Director George Pal was the first filmmaker to bring H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine to Hollywood. The movie plot stays close to the original novel. A scientist in the Victorian era builds a machine that brings him to the year 802,701, where he finds a very different Earth dominated by two tribes at war. Like the book, the movie is an archetypical voyage-and-return story where the journey changes the narrator and his perspective on the world and where it is going. The film is perhaps most important in retrospect, though, for introducing us to technological machines that can traverse time, a trope that would be widely embraced in action and sci-fi movies.

The Time Travelers (1964 )

The Time Travelers is a B-movie from the 1960s. Despite existing on the fringe of pop culture, the film has an amusing campy flavor, and given the film’s small budget, it showcases admirable ingenuity. It’s about a group of scientists who accidentally open a portal to the future with disastrous consequences. The future is an atomic wasteland with mutants, and like the protagonist in The Time Machine , the scientists must find their way back to the present day. Many fans of this film believe director Ib Melchior deserves more credit within the sci-fi genre, and the film did inspire the TV series The Time Tunnel (1966) and remake Journey to the Center of Time (1967).

Jubilee (1978)

Derek Jarman’s Jubilee is an avant-garde film born out of the punk rock era in Britain. The premise: Queen Elizabeth I (born in 1533) is transported by an occult figure to the United Kingdom in the 1970s. There she encounters a new world of gangs, totalitarian police, and a far-reaching dystopia of wretchedness. While the story has more of scrapbook feel than a coherent plot, Jarman’s unique film uses time travel as a device to make political and cultural commentary stating that across all time, whether punks or royalty, we all get corrupted by power, perhaps especially the outcasts. For more on Jubilee and its unusual history, read “A right royal knees-up” by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian .

Time After Time (1979)

Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time has a fantastical plot: the serial killer Jack the Ripper finds a time machine made by the author H.G. Wells. Then Jack the Ripper uses it to travel to modern America—San Francisco to be exact. H.G. Wells must use the time machine as well and track down Jack the Ripper before he causes too much chaos. This film is a prime example of a time travel story that tickles the imagination with whimsy and playfulness for the sake of entertainment.

New Time Travel Movies

Somewhere in time (1980).

Somewhere in Time , starring Christopher Reeves and Jane Seymour, is perhaps the most romantic time travel movie ever made. Christopher Reeve plays a young playwright in college. After the performance of his first play, an old woman comes up to him and hauntingly says “come back to me” while handing him a watch. A decade passes. He still has the watch. What did this old woman mean? Why did she give him this watch? As Reeve investigates, he eventually figures out how to travel back in time after talking to a physics professor. As he’s warped back to time, he meets this old woman again in her younger form. The movie is most remembered for romantic lines such as “I cannot find the words. Except for these: ‘I love you.’ Such would I say to him if he were really here.”

Time Bandits (1981)

Writer and producer Terry Gilliam describes his motion picture Time Bandits as the first installment of his “Trilogy of Imagination,” with  Brazil  (1985) and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen  (1988) as the second and third installment. All three films deal with time, aging, and escapism. Time Bandits is the only one of the three films to use time travel in the plot, and when director Terry Gilliam was asked why, he said that time travel was a “ metaphor for a child’s imagination ” and their “cosmic megalomania” — which is a beautiful statement about a beautiful and enchanting film.

The Philadelphia Experiment (1984)

The title of this film refers to a notorious incident that may or may not have happened at the Philadelphia Naval Yard in 1943—conspiracy theorists insist it happened, while the US Military denies it ever took place. Briefly, it involved an experiment with electromagnetic forces in which a ship, the USS Eldridge, disappeared from the radar.

In this cinematic retelling of the story, which takes the original rumored incident and fictionalizes it to add a time-travel element, David (Michael Pare) and Jim (Bobby Di Cicco) star as two sailors who jump ship in the middle of the experiment, only to find themselves transported to the year 1984. Faced by an angry mob at a restaurant, they take a woman named Allison (Nancy Allen) hostage at gunpoint and escape. Jim’s physical condition deteriorates to the point where he ceases to exist, but it is revealed he was somehow able to return to 1943. David stays in the year 1984 and gradually falls in love with Allison.

Terminator Franchise (1984 – 2021)

The Terminator franchise is undeniably influential in the time travel genre and as one of the most important legends within the the greater sci-fi cinematic canon. The franchise began in 1984 with the release of James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd’s The Terminator , a story about two time travelers from 2029 — Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and The Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) — going back to the 1980s to battle out the future of humanity. In sum, Kyle Reese has traveled back to the 80s to stop artificial intelligence from taking over the world and nuking most of humanity out of existence on August 29th, 1997 by protecting Sarah Connor and her unborn child John, who will lead the resistance against artificial intelligence in the 2020s. The Terminator, a cyborg or cybernetic organism, is there to kill Sarah and Reese and to ensure the child is never born so the self-aware computer system Skynet can rule the planet.

Although the first Terminator film was a blockbuster success, the sequel Terminator 2: Judgment Day cemented the franchise’s place in pop culture and is considered one of the best sequels ever made in Hollywood. In Judgment Day , Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character is sent back to the 90s, but this time as a hacked version designed to protect rather than kill Sarah and John Connor. The success of the sequel was due to the comical and heartwarming dynamic between Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator character and the young child John Connor (Edward Furlong) and the riveting sci-fi comic-book action.

With the launch of Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003, James Cameron left the franchise due to an internal dispute . Although Terminator 3 is still a fun and amusing movie, it marks the rapid commercialization of the franchise that led to a slew of additional sequels that many found to be lackluster: Terminator Salvation (2009), Terminator Genisys (2015), and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), as well as a spinoff TV show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles on Fox. In 2019’s Dark Fate , James Cameron returns to providing a background writing credit and serving as a producer, and the plot is actually a direct sequel to Terminator 2 and ignores the mythology created in the other versions.

Regarding the impact the franchise had on time travel, this quote has had the most staying power: “there’s no fate but what we make for ourselves” — and throughout all the films, the sense that we can control our destiny is at the heart of the narrative. For a detailed analysis of the actual science and absurdity of time travel in these films, read this conversation with a theoretical physicist .

Trancers (1984)

Trancers (also released as Future Cop ) is an example of a sci-fi action time travel movie. In a strange case of morphic resonance , it was released just a month after The Terminator and shares a similar storyline. Jack Deth, played by Tim Thomerson, is a Los Angeles cop from the 23rd century who hunts “trancers” (futuristic zombies). His most wanted criminal and the creator of these trancers has escaped by traveling back to the 1980s, so Jack has to travel back in time to catch him and stop his evil dominance. The movie had many sequels and adaptations; however, it never became the same kind of pop culture phenomenon the Terminator franchise became.

Back to the Future Trilogy (1985 – 1990)

Director Robert Zemeckis made one of the most memorable blockbusters of all time with Back to the Future (1985). The next two films in the trilogy, Back to the Future Part II (1989) and Back to the Future Part III (1990) were also roaring, action-adventure flicks adored by fans and with high accolades on the ranking site Rotten Tomatoes.

What made these big Hollywood motion pictures work so well? Entertainment journalist Emily VanDerWerff explains how Back to the Future is just a super, super fun movie:

We all have a favorite big, dumb, fun movie that’s loud and raucous and less interested in any thematic depth than in giving us a great time. Such movies exhaust any critical objections and simply leave you spinning around, with a giddy smile on your face. For me, that movie is and always shall be  Back to the Future , a movie I consider literally perfect. Tell me about its imperfections. Point out to me its plot holes. Lecture me on how time travel doesn’t work like that. I don’t care. It’s a weird little science-fiction incest comedy that, to me, sets the standard all other popcorn movies must match, the one that leaves them all feeling a little bit lacking.

That is indeed the appeal — they’re just cinematic adventures that don’t purport to be anything else. Naturally, in terms of the logic of the time travel within the films, it’s a mess, but who cares? The Back to the Future franchise is important as time travel movies, because they provide a marvelous and comedic spectacle in a unique approach to science fiction.

The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (1988)

In this, the first big-budget collaboration between Australian and New Zealander filmmakers, Griffin (Hamish McFarlane) is a nine-year-old psychic boy whose abilities enable him to view alternate realities. He is able to look back and envision England in the 1300s, where the Black Plague threatens to kill everyone in a small, snowy village, so some of the men begin digging into the ground in a desperate attempt to find “the far side of the world.” The find it, indeed—but it’s a giant city in the 1900s, which causes the film suddenly to switch from black and white to full color in the manner of The Wizard of Oz. The tunnelers take their Old World beliefs with them as they attempt to navigate this strange new city—for example, when they see a submarine surface, they are terrified because they think it’s a giant sea creature coming to attack them.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

In this, the first film of a successful 1980s franchise, Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) are a pair of high-school would-be musicians in San Dimas, CA who are tasked with a high-school history project requiring them to describe how three prominent historical figures would describe life in San Dimas in the 1980s. They are visited from the year 2688 by a man named Rufus, whose time capsule resembles a phone booth. During their journeys to the past, Bill and Ted are able to transport Napoleon Bonaparte, Princess Elizabeth of England, Socrates, Sigmund Freud, Joan of Arc, and Abraham Lincoln to San Dimas in the 1980s, causing their high-school project to be a rousing success. Their time machine also allows them to travel into the future year of 2688, where they realize that they not only became successful musicians—they are the most admired men in history.

Forever Young (1992)

The narrative setup of the film involves cryogenics more than zipping through the space-time continuum. A test pilot is transported from 1939 to 1992 and falls in love. One lover of the film praises the way the storyline transcends many genres: “The movie, every bit a sci-fi film, manages to be a pretty engaging chick-flick as well. What I like most about it is that it manages to balance both genres fairly convincingly, and in the process, we are left with a nice piece of fiction, although something that won’t go down as a classic film by any stretch of the imagination, still manages to have great pacing and keep its audience’s attention until the final, beautiful moments.”

Groundhog Day (1993)

Groundhog Day is a classic time travel film and perhaps the greatest fantasy comedy in cinematic history. Bill Murray’s character is forced to relive the same day, February 2, over and over again. He’s stuck in a time loop with no way out. The film is comical and heartwarming. It also captures an important paradox of time for all of us—how do we break out of our own habits and beliefs and see the world as something new? While all might not be stuck in a literal time loop, our daily routines can frequently put us in a metaphorical time loop that Groundhog Day lays bare and inspires us to break and be open to the new.

Timecop (1994)

Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as a world-weary cop in the year 1995 who must travel in time to prevent a corrupt US government and its Time Enforcement Police—an organization set up to prevent any sort of time travel that will subvert the government’s stranglehold on such technology. His first journey takes him all the way back to the year 1863, where he must bust a Civil War conspiracy where gold intended for Robert E. Lee’s army is stolen, forward to the year 2004, when the same gold is used to finance a corrupt Senator’s campaign. Roger Ebert wrote, “More than most movies about time travel, ‘Timecop’ invites you to meditate on the logical contradictions of the genre.”

12 Monkeys (1995)

Bruce Willis stars as James Cole, a prisoner in the year 2036 who is trapped in a tunnel underneath Philadelphia after a worldwide plague wiped out most of humanity back in the mid-1990s. As part of the one percent of humanity who survived the pandemic but also as a prisoner whose life is not deemed to be worth much, Cole “volunteers” to travel back in time to stop a maniacal animal-rights activist (Brad Pitt) from releasing the virus that almost exterminated humanity. This involves Cole first being scrubbed clean and then placed in a plastic time-travel device. But since time travel has not yet been perfected, he is first sent back to 1990, and then even further back to 1914, before finally landing in Baltimore in 1996, right before the outbreak. Without revealing the ending, director Terry Gilliam reveals why Cole’s mission may not have been successful: “[It] seems, in the short term, to be a disaster. But in the long term, it’s good for the people 40 years in the future, because they’ll reclaim the world. It’s like agriculture, you gotta chop the plants down, dig ‘em into the ground, and in the future great shoots will sprout up.”

Retroactive (1997)

A time-travel road thriller by director Louis Mourneau, Retroactive stars Frank Whaley as Brian, a brilliant physicist obsessed with time travel. James Belushi plays Frank, a sociopathic computer chip thief. After Frank and his wife Rayanne (Shannon Whirry) pick up a female psychiatrist whose car broke down on the roadside, Frank flies into a rage when he learns that Rayanne has been cheating on him and kills her. But Brian’s flux capacitor allows Rayanne to travel back in time 20 minutes before her murder several times—with things only getting worse until she finally gets it right. According to a review in Gizmodo , “ Retroactive does have some interesting thoughts to share about the similarities between time travel and psychotherapy. Karen explains to Frank and Rayanne that the essence of psychotherapy is examining your past life and imagining what you would do differently given a second chance.”

Blast from the Past (1999)

This romantic comedy film by Hugh Wilson is the most realistic time travel movie on the list because, well, it could actually happen. Brendan Fraser has lived his whole life in a bomb shelter, and now at the age of 30, his dad—played by Christopher Walken—allows him to leave the bunker. Fraser’s character is indeed a blast from the past, as he knows nothing about society and current pop culture; all he knows is what he knew 30 years ago when he went into the bunker. While technically it’s not a time travel movie, it does deal with time distortion as well as typical time travel plot devices, and it’s a rather fun and heartwarming movie that contrasts a radically changing society with the difficulty humans have dealing with it.

Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko is a cult film and has a rich philosophical backstory about time travel and alternative timelines. The director of the film, Richard Kelly, goes so deep on the topic he even wrote a companion book called Philosophy of Time Travel , which explains the metaphysics of the film in greater detail. The plot while rather complex has divided critics since release — but the movie resonates both as a highly esoteric sci-fi movie and fun coming-of-age tale.

Primer (2004)

Abe and Aaron are two engineers who spend their spare time developing entrepreneurial tech projects out of Aaron’s garage. During an experiment with electromagnetic reduction of an object’s weight, they stumble upon the “A-to-B” causal loop effect, meaning that objects suspended in the weight-reducing field can travel back and forth in time in a repeating loop. Abe builds a device he calls “The Box,” big enough for one human, to test whether it will enable him and Aaron to travel back and forth in time. It works—in six-hour intervals, which are long enough for them to do things such as successfully bet on stock-market manipulations. But since they begin to notice adverse effects of the experiment, such as ear bleeds and their handwriting progressively worsening, they develop a “failsafe” box that enables them to travel backward in time four days to prevent the cumulative negative effects of their time traveling. However, the failsafe box fails — and proves to be anything but safe.

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

Ashton Kutcher stars as Evan, a troubled man in his 20s who suddenly discovers that he is able to travel back in time merely by reading his childhood journals. He attempts to travel back to change things so that he and everyone he knows in the present is in a happier and better place. But just as the scientific concept of the “Butterfly Effect” dictates, changing even one tiny thing can have unintended and even disastrous consequences. For example, during one spate of time-traveling, Evan accidentally kills his girlfriend and winds up in prison and must devise a way to escape. The film was a box-office success and led to two sequels: The Butterfly Effect 2 (2006) and The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations (2009).

Kate & Leopold (2001)

Kate & Leopold is a typical Hollywood romance movie about an English duke time traveler from 1876 who falls in love with a woman from 21st century New York. Like most time travel stories, Kate & Leopold is filled with inconsistencies and has a terrifying premise . Regardless, the movie was a mainstream success in the early 2000s because it used time travel to portray a perfect love that transcended time and space. Real love can be hard and sad. So what better way to idealize romance than bringing it outside time? This is why the subgenre of time travel romance works so well with audiences.

13 Going On 30 (2004)

Jenna is a 13-year-old girl in 1987 who dreams of fitting in with the “cool kids,” who at her school are a clique known as the Six Chicks. Her best friend, Matty, builds her a Barbie’s Dream House and sprinkles it with “wishing dust.” But Jenna’s interest in Matty is only platonic. When the Six Chicks pull a prank on Jenna—promising to bring the boy she has a crush on at school—they instead bring Matty, which causes Jenna to feel betrayed and to kick Matty out of the house. She is so enraged by her betrayal, she bangs her head against the closet and wishes she was thirty—causing some of the wishing dust to fall on her head and for her to be transported 17 years into the future to the year 2004, where she is 30 but still feels as if she is 13.

Southland Tales (2006)

Southland Tales feels more like a puzzle (or cinematic hieroglyphic) than a movie, which is a nice way of saying it’s an incomprehensible mess. Directed by Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame, Southland Tales is by almost all accounts an “ego-fueled folly” and a terribly, terribly bad movie . Despite Southland Tales ‘ unwatchable nature, it features a blockbuster cast of pop-culture darlings:

• Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) plays amnesiac action star and Mandy Moore plays his wife.
• Amy Poehler’s character is a punk neo-Marxist.
• Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a porn star named Krysta Lynn Kapowski (aka Krysta Now).
• Justin Timberlake plays an Iraq War veteran addicted to a drug called Liquid Karma.
• Seann William Scott plays a cop.

Actors aside, Southland Tales is not a conventional Hollywood blockbuster. Consider the film cost over $17 million to make and generated less than $300,000 in theaters. Southland Tales is more in the tradition of the aforementioned arthouse time travel film Jubilee from Derek Jarman than The Terminator franchise, offering esoteric cultural and political prophecy through a heap of images that begin in media res and lack a comprehensible storyline to anyone but the most patient cinephile.

How is time travel related to the story? Suffice it to say that Seann William Scott’s character notices his reflection is delayed in the mirror and some kind of black hole thing opened up in a desert that is causing a wave of chaos. There are nods to the rip in the space-time continuum from Donnie Darko as well.

Southland Tales can be interpreted more generously . The movie isn’t just a science fiction time travel film, it is the ultimate postmodern time travel film. Why? Because it presents a Gen Z version of time where traditional notions of narrative and time have been eroded to the point of no return, and we all live in the amnesia-inducing and ahistorical nowness of social media feeds. There is no time to traverse, just content blocks to bounce endlessly and mindlessly through, which is how the movie moves in a way.

Indeed, it might be said if Southland Tales was released as 15- to 60-second clips posted to TikTok and Instagram Reels instead of as a linear film in theaters, it might be a viral success. For the movie is just a weird scrapbook of skits of lip-syncing, conspiratorial thinking, stunts, dancing, extremist politics, dress-up, and surveillance footage all tinged with an ooze of faux-sexuality and drugged-up schizophrenia.

Deja Vu (2006)

Filmed in New Orleans, Déjà Vu stars Denzel Washington as a New Orleans police officer who is enlisted in a new government project called Snow White. He is shown a video screen and told that it allows him to look at images from four days and six hours ago from any possible angle. What he is not told but discovers on his own is that a screen is actually a time machine that allows him to view and manipulate events as they actually are happening four days and six hours ago, so he marshals his energies to prevent a bombing and save a woman’s life.

Timecrimes (2007)

A man named Hector looks through binoculars deep into the woods, where he sees a woman who appears to be naked. When he searches in the woods for her, he finds her lying naked on a rock. Suddenly, a man with a bandaged face appears and stabs Hector with a pair of scissors. The man begins to chase Hector through the woods, but Hector escapes into a house which he thinks is abandoned, only to realize there’s some strange machinery there. The “strange machinery” turns out to be a time machine, causing Hector to travel back in time one hour—where he must engage in battle with his own self an hour in the future. Through a series of disasters, he realizes to his horror that the naked woman he saw in the woods was his own wife.

The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

In this cinematic adaptation of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel of the same name, Eric Bana stars as Henry DeTample, a man whose ultra-rare genetic disorder enables him to time-travel while his patient wife Clare waits for him at home, unaware of why he constantly goes missing. Since he is the time machine himself, he can only travel back so far as his birth but not before. He uses his strange powers to travel back in time and save his mother from a car crash that would have killed her.   Roger Ebert  wrote, “If you allow yourself to think for one moment of the paradoxes, contradictions, and logical difficulties involved, you will be lost.”

Hot Tub Time Machine (2010)

Three friends, seeking a vacation, travel to a run-down ski lodge for a few days, only to discover that the hot tub is actually a time machine that transports them back to the year 1986, when they’d previously spent an extremely unpleasant night at the same resort in the same hot tub. But since they want to make sure that one of the friends’ nephews will be born, they have to recreate the steps of that fateful night without changing a thing. Reel Views wrote, “An attempt to flavor The Hangover with a little Back to the Future , this film argues that what happens in the ’80s stays in the ’80s, but does so with middling results.”

Source Code (2011)

Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Colter Stevens, a soldier who was mortally wounded in Afghanistan but wakes up in the body of a man named Sean on a Chicago subway train. Colter realizes to his horror that as Sean, he is part of a top-secret governmental time-travel experiment designed to find the terrorist who bombed the train and to prevent it from happening. He relives the last eight minutes of Sean’s life over and over again in his attempt to thwart the bombing. Reel Views wrote, “ Source Code is what might happen if one cross-bred Groundhog Day with 24 and The Matrix .”

Looper (2012)

In a dystopian future, time travel is controlled by organized crime, and a “looper” is someone who kills criminals who time travel to the past from the future to alter history. Bruce Willis stars as Joe, who is sent back to the past, only to confront his former self, who is tasked with assassinating his future self. But both versions of “Joe” survive, sending the crime syndicate who controls time travel into a frenzy to remediate the situation before it gets out of control.

Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

Wanted: Somebody to go back in time with me. This is not a joke. P.O. Box 91 Ocean View, WA 99393. You’ll get paid after we get back. Must bring your own weapons. I have only done this once before. SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED.

In a film that is about time travel but seems to contain no actual time travel and is based on a real-life ad placed in a magazine in 1997, a journalist named Jeff (Jake Johnson) takes it upon himself to track down the prankster who placed the ad. Two interns assist him in his quest and are able to save two lives—but it remains unclear whether any time travel actually took place in the process. Because of this, Roger Ebert hailed Safety Not Guaranteed as a sterling example of how “to make a time-travel movie containing no apparent paradoxes.”

Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

The slogan of this Tom Cruise film is Live Die Repeat , and this captures the contribution of this film to the time travel canon. Edge of Tomorrow is a retread of Groundhog Day applied to a high-tech military confronting an alien invasion . Cruise’s character, Major William Cage, wakes each day to relive the same massacre and must figure out a way to overcome it. Director Doug Liman fought for the time travel element of the film and recalls in an interview with Collider that the movie studio wanted to remove it :

When you try and develop a movie with a world that involves time travel, you quickly realize that humans are never going to travel through time because there are so many paradoxes. You can hardly get through a screenplay. At some point during the development of the screenplay of the first film, Warner Bros said to me, ‘Does he need to travel through time? Maybe he could just battle aliens.’ I was like, ‘Well if you want me to make this movie, he does. I’m not interested in aliens, I’m interested in the repeating the day part.’ Doug Liman

Thankfully Warner Bros allowed the film to keep the time loop element, and many people consider it one of the best action films of the 2010s, an assessment we concur with. Edge of Tomorrow is a tremendous cinematic accomplishment for the way it balances humor, incredible sci-fi special effects, action, and stellar acting performances with a refreshingly clever screenplay.

Time travel in the film is facilitated by a super organism alien that is so advanced it has a different understanding of time as well as the ability to traverse it. When Tom Cruise’s character kills a special breed of this alien, the chemical-blood element seeps into his body giving him the ability to repeat time as well. The film does not fixate much on the mechanics or physics of how this works but as a result, it feels believable enough.

Predestination (2014)

Predestination reaches into the core of the paradoxes inherent in the very idea of time travel. It stars Ethan Hawke as a temporal agent with the ability to inhabit time loops and to stop crimes before they happen. In the process of sending Hawke’s character back to 1970 in an attempt to avert a 1975 attack by a character known as the Fizzle Bomber…then back to the 1960s…and then forward to the 1980s… it becomes unclear whether or not Hawke’s character and those of several other prominent players are actually the same person. In the process, time-travel quandaries such as the Predestination Paradox , the Bootstrap Paradox , the Temporal Paradox , and the Let’s Kill Hitler Paradox are all explored. A review on Astronomy Trek states, “this cerebral sci-fi thriller navigates through multiple twists of fate as the story’s tragic key character is gradually revealed to be [a] self-created entity trapped within a closed loop in time.”

Reset (2017)

Produced by Jackie Chan and directed by Korean filmmaker Yoon Hong-seung, Reset is a time travel movie in Chinese with English subtitles. The film has an emphasis on time travel realism with a focus on wormhole technology and parallel universes but is thoroughly an action thriller about a young mom who loses her son and then is forced to travel through time and different universes to get him back. GirlsWithGuns  praised the film for its “fresh and original concept, exactly the kind of thing which Hollywood desperately needs in the genre of late” — and it’s a unique contribution to time travel cinema from a non-English perspective.

When We First Met (2018)

When We First Met is a good example of a time loop movie used as a narrative structure for a romantic comedy. It applies the Groundhog Day formula to figuring out who you love, and the day repeated over and over again is Halloween. Our time traveler, Noah — played by Adam DeVine of Comedy Central’s Workaholics fame — keeps going back in time to try to make a girl fall in love with him. Many parts of the film are cliché, and time travel physics are naturally a mess, but it’s an amusing and heartwarming film for a rainy day.

See You Yesterday (2019)

What if Spike Lee produced Back to the Future instead of Steven Spielberg? And what if that film captured the same fun and whimsy of the Back to the Future franchise but addressed racism and police violence instead? This is exactly what is accomplished in See You Yesterday — social relevance is merged with the fantastical and imaginative power of a sci-fi time travel movie. As a time travel movie, and as a philosophical statement, the movie does an incredible job of being playful but also delivering a real-world message, which critic Carla Hay at the Culture Mix describes thus: “ See You Yesterday shows people, no matter what their age, that life is not about changing the past but how we move forward.”

Avengers: Endgame (2019)

The culmination of the first three phases of Marvel Studios films (aka The Infinity Saga), Avengers: Endgame is the second highest-grossing movie of all time with a $2.7 billion tally. With half the population wiped out by Thanos, the Avengers attempt a daring trip through time in an attempt to reverse the Mad Titan’s destructive actions to bring balance to the galaxy. Directors Anthony and Joe Russo revisit several important time frames in the MCU and challenge the normal time travel rules by having younger and older versions of characters directly interact. Screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeeley establish some basic time travel laws that hold up within the context of the film while also poking fun at the Back to the Future time paradox. Endgame is the culmination of 21 films so prepare to spend some time on an extended marathon session to fully appreciate all the references.

Palm Springs (2020)

Palm Springs is a Hulu original film and arguably the most original comedic take on the Groundhog Day formula since, well, Groundhog Day in 1993. Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti star in the film as a pair of 20-somethings stuck in a time loop together on November 9th, the wedding day of their mutual friend. It’s a unique time travel film because of how successful the gonzo, often nihilistic humor is throughout the film’s 90-minute runtime. Palm Springs is also successful in provoking the viewer to ask interesting questions about their own life, like how much fun would you have if you could live the same day over and over again with no consequences for your actions? Likewise, what existential dread would you feel living a life with no responsibility? The film joyfully brings you to that adventurous thought experiment.

Bill & Ted Face the Music (2020)

In this, the third film in the Bill & Ted time-travel series that came out nearly thirty years after the 1991 sequel Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey, the time-traveling aspiring rock stars find themselves as middle-aged and stuck in the near future where they still have been unable to find the musical success which will enable them to save the world. They are then suddenly transported to the year 2067 and are confronted with their elderly and dying selves. They must return to the past in a hurry to sing and record a hit that will save the universe — but the song will happen with the help of their daughters, Billie and Theadora. As a time travel movie, Bill & Ted Face Music is particularly fun because they travel back in this movie to put all the best musicians that ever lived into a supergroup.

The Adam Project (2022)

Ryan Reynolds stars in this sci-fi/drama film from Netflix that explores time travel and multiverses . The Adam Project is most successful as family-friendly movie with heartwarming laughs. The charming plot involves an older version of oneself visiting the younger version and the two teaming up to save the world. It is typical formulaic Hollywood, but it works as a fun little ride of a movie.

The Flash (2023)

In The Flash , the scarlet speedster discovers that he can travel through time using the “speed force” that give him his superpowers . The Flash, who is Barry Allen in his everyday life, decides to use his newfound time-traveling ability to go back in time and prevent the death of his mother. Naturally, his actions have dire consequences. The Flash tries to explain time travel in a novel way, presenting it as an action that changes timelines not just in a straight line towards the future, but in a way that alters events in all directions of space and time. So Barry doesn’t just change his past, he changes the history of events years prior to the date he travels to, and in locations he’s never even been to. This way of looking at time travel gives the filmmakers unlimited freedom to change whatever they want within the DCEU even if it doesn’t really make a lot of sense.

More Time Travel Movies

• Cyborg 2087 (1966) takes place in the year 2087, where governments are now using totalitarianism to control the population. A group of “free thinkers” send a cyborg time traveler back into the past to target the person they believe is responsible for their dystopian society.
• Planet of the Apes (1968) a great deal of this popular franchise has aspects of time-bending woven within the plot.
• Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968) is a 60s sci-fi time travel film from France. A suicide survivor just released from the hospital agrees to participate in a mysterious time travel experiment. He is sent back in time and forced to relive his most painful memories.
• The Final Countdown (1980) this Kirk Douglas film tells the story modern aircraft carrier thrown back to 1941 near Hawaii.
• Cavegirl (1985) follows a high-school boy who gets lost on a class trip and ends up entering a time portal that sends him to the Stone Age. He falls in love and must fight off murderously jealous cannibal cavemen!
• Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) Kirk and his crew travel back from the 23rd century to San Francisco in the 1980s to avert a situation that could destroy life on Earth.
• Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann (1982) a dirt-bike racer wanders off course in the desert and winds up being transported to the year 1877.
• Flight of the Navigator (1986) opens with a young man discovering that he has been the face of a missing-child poster for the past eight years. The plot weaves together alien spaceships, time dilation, and mind transfers.
• Bill & Ted’s Bogus Journey (1991) the second installment in this stoner series featuring Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter.
• Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) is a 1960s-inspired film that follows a cheeky British spy who fights his nemesis throughout time in an effort to save his future self. Dr. Evil has invented a powerful new time machine and is determined to sabotage Austin Powers’s future.
• Frequency (2000) centers on an NYC detective whose firefighter father died in a tragic accident thirty years earlier. The detective ends up finding a faulty radio that opens a channel of communication across time between him and his late father.
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) in the third installment of one of the most successful literary and film franchises of all time, Harry Potter and his friends use the Time Turner, an hourglass that sends you back one hour in time for every time you turn it upside-down and reset the trickling sand. This proves to be a lifesaver for Harry, who learns to his dismay that the evil Lord Voldemort has escaped Azkaban prison and is seeking to kill him.
• Click (2006) features a workaholic husband and father, played by Adam Sandler, who discovers a magic remote-control device that allows him to control time and fast-forward through any moment in life that he wishes. He soon discovers devastating disadvantages to this technological miracle.
• Premonition (2007) is a supernatural thriller about a woman whose husband dies suddenly. The storyline weaves throughout the widow’s experiences in the days leading up to his death. She attempts to piece together clues to identify his killer and save herself.
• Triangle (2009) is set on a cruise ship caught in a time loop.
• Star Trek (2009) a Romulan ship called the Narada and Spock’s vessel simultaneously go into a black hole and are sent back in time, but 25 years apart.
• Haunted – 3D (2011) marks India’s first 3D feature film release. This supernatural horror flick focuses on a realtor responsible for selling a haunted house. He experiences sinister paranormal presences and travels back in time to prevent them from ever coming alive.
• Sound of My Voice (2011) deals with charismatic cult leader that claims she is a time traveler.
• 11 A.M. (2013) is a Korean sci-fi thriller that dives into a futuristic underwater marine laboratory where a time machine is invented. Surveillance-camera footage offers the lab workers clues on troubling mysteries of the past.
• About Time (2013) at age 21, a man named Tim (Domnhall Gleeson) realizes he’s able to travel back in time and fix his life, so he travels back in time to get a girlfriend—but it doesn’t quite end well.
• Interstellar (2014) this Christopher Nolan film deals with time travel from light speed travel and intergalactic exploration. More of a study of aging in time vs. on Earth than time travel, it still touches on many tropes of time distortion and travel.
• X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014) Wolverine is sent into the past with a daunting mission: He must change history and, in the course, assure a better future for both humans and mutants.
• Lucy (2014) stars Scarlett Johansson as a young woman who is kidnapped and forced to conceal and smuggle drugs into Europe. An accident punctures the powerful drugs into her bloodstream, causing her to develop psychokinetic powers such as time travel and telekinesis.
• Doctor Strange (2016) features many time loops, which director Scott Derrickson says isn’t technically time travel: “Well, we don’t time travel in the movie. He reverses time, and time resets. But there’s only ever one timeline, and so it’s a movement of that timeline back and then forward.”
• Synchronicity (2016) is a cyberpunk movie inspired by Blade Runner . A man needs to travel back in time to stop an attractive young woman and a wealthy tycoon from stealing his invention.
• Time Trap (2017) this low-budget sci-fi movie was made popular through distribution on Netflix. A critic at Inverse describes the movie: “Time Trap  is the perfect indie gem to see storytelling in its most simple form. The exposition takes a found-footage angle, making it feel all the more real, even when the footage is found in the suit of an 8-foot-tall spaceman. Yes, it’s cheesy, but it strikes the perfect balance of mindless fun and thought-provoking concepts.”
• Happy Death Day (2017) takes the Groundhog Day formula and applies it a slasher and serial killer film. Watch this one if you’re looking for a horror movie with time travel.
• The Man With The Magic Box (2019) is a Polish sci-fi dystopian film set in 2030. A janitor finds a time-traveling device and accidentally gets himself stuck in 1950s communist Poland.
• In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) is a science-fiction movie from Netflix in which Rya, the protagonist, travels back in time in nine-year intervals to kill the people responsible for the mess the world has become in the present.
• James vs .  His Future Self  (2019) James’s future self travels back in time to prevent the invention of a time machine, which leads to a battle between future and past versions of the same man.
• 2067 (2020) is an Australian science fiction film where time travel is used to fix climate change.
• The Tomorrow War (2021) a man gets drafted to travel into the future, where he must do battle in a war where humanity is forced to confront everything that went wrong in the past. This is one of the newest and most exciting time travel movies released in a while.
• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) An aging Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is drawn into an adventure that involves his goddaughter Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and an artifact that is said to hold the secret to time travel.

History of Time Travel Storytelling

Time travel storytelling as a science fiction phenomenon began with Enrique Gaspar’s book The Time Ship (1887) and became mainstream in the late 1800s because of the success by H. G. Wells’s novel The Time Machine (1895). In terms of cultural memory, it might be said the fever dream tour of the past and future in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) is the most imprinted time travel story in Western consciousness.

As far as Hollywood’s impact, Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future franchise (1985 – 1990) has a great deal of pop culture clout. The ancient idea of infinite loop or eternal return popularized in Groundhog Day (1993) has become a mainstay plot device of modern cinema. And of course there is the Terminator franchise (1984 – 2021), which defined action movies and made Arnold Schwarzenegger into a star.

Like ghost movies , time travel movies transcend any one genre. Time travel is used in everything from romance films to comedies to arthouse cinema to Marvel superhero movies to thrillers and, of course, to science fiction. No matter the genre, though, basically all time travel films require a suspension of disbelief, as they’re full of plot holes and hardly scientifically accurate .

Meet The Author

Chris Laverne

Chris likes weird movies more than horror movies. He studied media, philosophy and literature at Hampshire College. His writing for Creepy Catalog tends to use cinema as a portal for understanding larger societal trends.

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Movies Featuring Time Loops & Time Travel

1. Donnie Darko

2. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time

3. Time Traveller

4. Steins;Gate

5. 12 Monkeys

6. The Visitors

7. Groundhog Day

9. The Terminator

10. Terminator 2: Judgment Day

11. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

12. Terminator Salvation

13. Source Code

16. Triangle

17. Timecrimes

18. Dead End

19. Time Lapse

20. Project Almanac

21. Timespace

22. Coherence

23. The I Inside

24. Retroactive

26. Lost Highway

27. Dark Country

28. Repeaters

29. Memory Lane

30. The Reeds

31. The Butterfly Effect

32. Extracted

33. 11 Minutes Ago

34. Premature

35. Fetching Cody

37. The Door

38. Enter Nowhere

39. Happy Accidents

40. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel

41. Safety Not Guaranteed

42. Pleasantville

43. The Time Traveler's Wife

44. About Time

45. Midnight in Paris

46. The Time Machine

47. The Lake House

48. The Time Machine

49. La Jetée

50. Timeline

51. Slaughterhouse-Five

52. Time After Time

53. The Final Countdown

54. The Philadelphia Experiment

55. Back to the Future

56. Back to the Future Part II

57. Back to the Future Part III

58. S. Darko

59. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

60. Star Trek

61. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure

62. Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey

63. Biggles: Adventures in Time

64. Timestalkers

65. The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey

66. Millennium

67. Grand Tour: Disaster in Time

68. Time Runner

69. magic müller.

70. Run Lola Run

72. Timecop

73. Demolition Man

74. 100 Million BC

75. Moebius

76. Star Trek: First Contact

77. Thrill Seekers

78. Frequency

79. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

80. Slipstream

81. Hot Tub Time Machine

82. All Over Again

84. Clockstoppers

85. Deja Vu

86. Freejack

87. grand tour: disaster in time.

88. Idiocracy

89. I'll Follow You Down

90. Journey to the Center of Time

91. Men in Black³

92. My Future Boyfriend

93. Lost in Space

94. The Spirit of '76

95. Time Changer

96. Timerider: The Adventure of Lyle Swann

97. Timequest

98. The Yesterday Machine

99. 13 Going on 30

100. 17 Again

More to explore, recently viewed.

Best Time Travel Movies (Find Rare Gems Here)

If you’re looking to ensure that you’ve watched all of the best time travel movies ever made, you’re in the right place. Contrary to the usual “best time travel lists” all over the internet, this one is a continually evolving one, and films keep getting added. So do drop a comment with your favourite flick if you don’t see it here. So for time travel films, this is your one-stop-shop. I know some of the classics may not be in the list yet, but it’s just a matter of time. All the titles are ranked based on the BaTTR Score ( Barry’s Time Travel Review Score ), a rating mechanism created to particularly rate movies based on time travel. Let’s go through the best time travel movies ranked in reverse order by the BaTTR Score.

If you’re looking specifically for time-loop films where a character lives the same day over and over again, check this – Every Time Loop Movie .

• – Movies Ranked 83 to 81
• – Movies Ranked 80 to 71
• – Movies Ranked 70 to 61
• – Movies Ranked 60 to 51
• – Movies Ranked 50 to 41
• – Movies Ranked 40 to 31
• – Top 30 Movies
• – Top 20 Movies
• – Top 10 Movies

Best Time Travel Movies: 83 to 81

83. terminator 5: genisys (2015).

With a brand new Sarah Connor and Terminator model, this film tried it’s best to recover the series from the wreck that Terminator 4 was. Sadly, one does not simply mess around with timelines in a way that undoes T1 and T2 and get away with it. After over a decade, it was good to see Arnold reprising his role. I suspect this film might always stay at the bottom of this evolving best time travel films list. You can find a quick discussion about the film here – Terminator Genisys Explained .

BaTTR Score: 1.20 ⏱ Terminator 5 – Why this score?

82. Before I Fall (2017)

A high-school girl begins reliving one day of her life after dying in a car accident. Going through the many time-loops, she understands the impact she can make on the people in her life.

BaTTR Score: 1.30 ⏱ Before I Fall – Why this score?

81. Terminator 6: Dark Fate (2019)

Dark Fate saw both Sarah Conor and T-101 coming back to settle an old score. The movie felt like an alternate-reality version of T2: Judgement Day. Though it was rinse-dry-repeat of the same concept, it still manages to keep you guessing. Some impressive CGI does transport you back to 1991 as you see some very familiar faces in events that never occurred before this film – I know this is cryptic, but I can’t say more without spoiling it. If you’re looking for a quick summary of the entire franchise – every Terminator movie summarized .

BaTTR Score: 1.30 ⏱ Terminator 6 – Why this score?

Best Time Travel Movies: 80 to 71

80. ritânâ / returner (2002).

Returner is a Japanese film that sees a girl travelling back in time, from a dystopian future, to try and stop an alien race from invading the planet. She arrives in the present time and forces a talented assassin to help her with her quest.

BaTTR Score: 1.35 ⏱ Returner – Why this rating?

79. See You Yesterday (2019)

See You Yesterday follows two wiz-kids who invent a time machine and go back in time by one day to save a sibling who was killed due to a mistaken police shooting. They soon realize it’s never easy to change the past without consequences.

BaTTR Score: 1.35 ⏱ See You Yesterday – Why this rating?

78. Synchronic (2019)

This film is about a synthetic drug that hits the legal market, making consumers travel through time. One man goes on a hunt for his friend’s daughter, who might be lost in time. Here’s a detailed breakdown –  Synchronic movie explained .

BaTTR Score: 1.40 ⏱ Synchronic –  Why this score?

77. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines  (2003)

The third instalment came a decade after the superhit sequel – Judgement Day. The terminators are back from the future, and the filmmakers tried to put a new spin on the film by shifting the attention from Sarah and John Connor to another person by the name Katherine Brewster. It was good to see Arnold reprise his role after a long break. Honestly, this film even ended well, and part 4 should have taken it to the point leading up to Kyle and the very first Terminator. But clearly, an end was never intended for the Terminator Series .

BaTTR Score: 1.40 ⏱ Terminator 3 – Why this rating?

76. The Final Countdown (1980)

This 80s film sees a modern super-aircraft carrier that gets hit by an electric storm that transports the vessel to 1941- a day before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The crew are left the choice to alter history or not. The Final Countdown is an alternate-history film which delivers very well on this engaging tale.

BaTTR Score: 1.50 ⏱ Final Countdown –  Why this rating?

75. Time Bandits (1981)

Time Bandits is a fun fantasy film that sees a young boy joining a bunch of dwarfs on a journey through time as they run into epic fictional and real characters from history. It’s a pretty loaded cast and is a very entertaining movie.

BaTTR Score: 1.50 ⏱ Time Bandits –  Why this rating?

74. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2010: Live Action)

This live-action film is based on a novel by the same name. The storyline has no commonalities with the 2006 Anime other than the fact that they are both on this top time travel movies list. In fact, this film is a sequel to the 1983 flick also by the same name. The movie follows a girl who travels back in time to fulfill her seemingly dying mother’s wish.

BaTTR Score: 1.50 ⏱ The Girl Who Leapt Through Time – Why this score?

73. The Lift / El Ascensor (2021)

The Lift is a Spanish film centred on a couple arguing inside an elevator on their way out of the building. Soon as they hit the lowest floor, one of them ends up returning to the moment they entered the lift. The rest of the film takes us through the couple’s time in the elevator and their attempts to break free.

BaTTR Score: 1.55 ⏱ The Lift – Why this rating?

72. Repeaters (2010)

Three people in rehab suddenly find themselves waking up on the same day repeatedly. While one of them sees this as a blessing, the other two want to stop the phenomenon leading to a cat and mouse chase.

BaTTR Score: 1.55 ⏱ Repeaters – Why this rating?

71. Happy Death Day 2U (2019)

This is the second instalment of the film series. While the first movie was an unexpected surprise, the sequel as in most cases, doesn’t deliver as well. That said Happy Death Day 2U is a fun film with all the characters coming back to reprise their roles with a lovely little twist.

BaTTR Score: 1.55 ⏱ Happy Death Day 2 – Why this rating?

Best Time Travel Movies: 70 to 61

70. naked (2017) / naken (2000).

Naked is a funny time-loop film that sees Marlon Wayans’ character living a one hour loop endlessly, which begins with him waking up naked inside an elevator. It is a remake of the Swedish film, Naken.

BaTTR Score: 1.55 ⏱ Naked / Naken – Why this score?

69. Project Almanac (2015)

Project Almanac follows a bunch of teenagers who stumble upon a time machine in one of their home’s basement. While initially, they use the time machine carefully with many defined ethical rules, as expected, they break those rules. For all the details about this film, you can check this out –  Project Almanac Explained .

BaTTR Score: 1.65 ⏱ Project Almanac – Why this rating?

68. Men In Black 3 (2012)

In this third instalment of the film series, Agent J finds himself slipping into an alternate timeline where Agent K does not exist. J goes back in time to hunt down the alien Boris, who is responsible for the altered history. It was good to have Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones reprise their roles with the addition of Josh Brolin in the mix.

BaTTR Score: 1.65 ⏱ Men In Black 3 – Why this rating?

67. Midnight In Paris (2011)

This is a super-light romantic comedy where Owen Wilson’s character gets picked up by a bunch of people at midnight each night, taking him to the 20s. The film smartly weaves in a variety of characters from history and has a brilliant cast.

BaTTR Score: 1.75 ⏱ Midnight In Paris – Why this score?

66. Time Trap (2017)

This film is a pleasant surprise. The plot synopsis makes it appear like it’s going to be a big blunder but Time Trap manages to turn thing around. The plot is centred on a group of students looking for their professor who goes missing after entering a mysterious cave. They follow him in to realize the true nature of the cave. You can read all the details about the plot here – Time Trap Explained . 

BaTTR Score: 1.75 ⏱ Time Trap – Why this rating?

65. The Time Machine (2002)

The Time Machine is based on H.G Wells book and is the second feature film adaptation of the novel. This movie attempted to create a variation to the original story to make it more fantastical. The Time Machine is the story of a man who goes far into the future. While visually, the movie did well, it didn’t create too much of a stir amongst movie viewers. The 1960 movie is much further below in this best time travel movies list.

BaTTR Score: 1.80 ⏱ The Time Machine – Why this rating?

64. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012)

A couple of magazine writers go over to investigate an ad in their magazine that requests someone interested in travelling back in time. On meeting the advertiser, it appears he might be a looney. Safety Not Guaranteed is a favourite of everyone who loves the time travel sub-genre and no time travel list is complete without it.

BaTTR Score: 1.80 ⏱ Safety Not  Guaranteed – Why this rating?

63. Mine Games (2012)

This one is an impressive looper film. A group of friends land up at an isolated cabin in the woods to celebrate their end of college. They find a mine nearby and enter it and unleash evil. It’s not a mindless slasher, so do give it a watch. For all details on the film check out – Mine Games explained .

BaTTR Score: 1.80 ⏱ Mine Games – Why this rating?

62. The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things (2021)

This one is a romantic film set inside infinite timeloops. I know you’re thinking Palm Springs (which is also there in this list of top time travel films), but The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things has an entirely different take on the subject. Here’s a detailed article – The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things explained .

BaTTR Score: 1.80 ⏱ The Map Of Tiny Perfect Things – Why this rating?

61. The Tomorrow War (2021)

In 2048, an alien species attacks Earth, and the future humans are unable to contain the battle. They travel back in time to the present, seeking help to fight in the tomorrow war. If you’d like to understand more here’s an article that goes into the timelines of The Tomorrow War .

BaTTR Score: 1.90 ⏱ The Tomorrow War – Why this score?

Best Time Travel Movies: 60 to 51

60. il mare (2000) / lake house (2006).

Lake House is a romantic film that narrates the story of two people who grow close and fall in love over a series of letters they exchange only to slowly realize that they may not be living in the same time. It’s a remake of a Korean film by the name Il Mare.

BaTTR Score: 1.95 ⏱ Il Mare / Lake House – Why this rating?

59. Time After Time (1979)

Time After Time is a hypothetical fantasy story of H.G. Wells (the Time Machine author), who creates a Time Machine, just like in the book. Soon enough, the plot takes a turn towards the pursuit of Jack The Ripper through time.

BaTTR Score: 2.00 ⏱ Time After Time – Why this rating?

58. The Time Traveler’s Wife (2009)

As the title of the movie suggests, the film revolves around a woman’s husband who has an abnormal condition where he uncontrollably travels to random points in time. Time Traveler’s Wife is not science fiction but more a romantic drama with Rachael McAdams and Eric Bana.

BaTTR Score: 2.00 ⏱ The Time Traveler’s Wife –  Why this rating?

57. The Adam Project (2022)

The Adam Project’s plot sees a man travel back in time to team up with his younger self to save the world. As corny as that sounds, that’s pretty much what the film is about. You can read all about it here –  The Adam Project explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.05 ⏱ The Adam Project – Why this rating?

56. Haunter (2013)

Haunter is a horror film that presents a story within loops of time. A girl wakes up repeatedly on the same day, the day before her birthday. As she begins finding out why, she is haunted by other spirits and a creepy old man. Here’s everything you need to know about the film –  Haunter explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.05 ⏱ Haunter – Why this rating?

55. Mega Time Squad (2018)

Mega Time Squad is a hilarious film that follows a small-time crook who picks up an ancient Chinese bracelet that allows him to travel back in time by a few minutes. Things get out of hands when he travels back too many times trying to escape death at the hands of a gangster.

BaTTR Score: 2.15 ⏱ Mega Time Squad – Why this score?

54. In The Shadow Of The Moon (2019)

In The Shadow Of The Moon is centred on a cop on the hunt for a serial killer who resurfaces mysteriously unaged every decade. He obsesses and waits for her to track her down and uncover her identity and origin. If you want to read about this film in detail, go here –  In The Shadow Of The Moon Explained  (it’s got a timeline diagram too).

BaTTR Score: 2.20 ⏱ In The Shadow Of The Moon – Why this rating?

53. About Time (2013)

About Time is a feel-good romantic-comedy film about a family whose male members can travel in time once they turn 21 years old. The lead character tries to utilize it to find love, but over the course of the film, we see him embracing life to the full and learns the true meaning of his gift. This is Rachael McAdams’ second film playing the wife of a time traveller.

BaTTR Score: 2.20 ⏱ About Time – Why this rating?

52. Boss Level (2021)

Boss Level is a timeloop film that combines insane amounts of action and comedy. The film has a great cast – Frank Grillo, Naomi Watts, Mel Gibson and Michelle Yeoh, to name a few. This one is really high on adrenaline.

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ Boss Level – Why this rating?

51. The Door Into Summer (2021)

The Door Into Summer is a Japanese adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s novel by the same name. The film is centred on a young robotics engineer tricked by his two partners and forced into cryosleep for 30 years. Check out the complete film details here – The Door Into Summer explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ The Door Into Summer –  Why this score?

Best Time Travel Movies: 50 to 41

50. somewhere in time (1980).

Somewhere In Time is a beautiful love story starring Christopher Reeve, a play writer who obsesses on a photo of a beautiful yesteryear actress and ends up going back in time by 70 years to meet her.

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ Somewhere In Time – Why this rating?

49. 12:01 (1993)

This is a TV movie based on a book by the same name. The word is that Groundhog Day plagiarized the story. Though there was a court case, it was withdrawn. The story sees a man trapped in a timeloop repeatedly witnessing the death of a woman he has a crush on.

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ 12:01 – Why this rating?

48. Happy Death Day (2017)

This is a looper slasher film that finds a college girl reliving the day she gets killed by a mysterious masked murderer over and over again. Happy Death Day is a hilarious take on the classic time-loop film with an intriguing plot. For a loop by loop breakdown of this film, check this out – Happy Death Day Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ Happy Death Day – Why this rating?

47. Groundhog Day (1993)

Groundhog Day is among the first few films that saw massive success in the space of a person being caught in an endless time-loop. Bill Murray shines in this role, and the film’s commercial success set the pathway for many such films after, most of which are on this list of best time travel movies.

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ Groundhog Day – Why this score?

46. My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday / Boku Wa Asu, Kinō No Kimi To Dēto Suru (2016)

This is an adorable Japanese romantic film that follows the lives of two people over a month as they fall in love and begin a relationship. The catch is that both of them are experiencing the flow of time in opposite directions. This film would easily be one of the best romantic time travel movies.

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ My Tomorrow, Your Yesterday – Why this rating?

45. Time Lapse (2014)

Time Lapse is a film about three friends who discover a camera in their dead neighbour’s house that takes photographs of the next day. What initially starts off as fear slowly turns into crazy ideas for each one to fulfill their desires. Take a look at this article which takes you through the plot one picture at a time – Time Lapse Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.25 ⏱ Time Lapse –  Why this rating?

44. Meet The Robinsons (2007)

This film is plain hilarious. A kid steals his father’s time machine to travel to the past but has it stolen. He teams up with a young scientist to help him trace a mysterious Bowler Hat Guy who has big plans for the time device.

BaTTR Score: 2.30 ⏱ Meet The Robinsons –  Why this rating?

43. X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014)

The X-Men series saw two different casts, the young and old counterparts. Days Of Future Past brought all of them together in one massive movie that saw Wolverine’s consciousness going back in time to stop the creation of sentinels that eventually hunt and kill every mutant on the planet. While the rest of the XCU had no time travel, DOFP secures its place on this best time travel movies list. Here’s a short explanation of the film and a timeline diagram – X-Men Days Of Future Past Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.35 ⏱ X-Men DOFP –  Why this rating?

42. Palm Springs (2020)

Palm Springs is an endless time-loop film that starts off bang in the middle of one of many loops the lead character has been stuck in. Furthermore, he gets a companion who happens to get trapped too. The film delves into romance in the context of an endless time trap. Here’s everything you need to know about the movie and its dinosaurs – Palm Springs Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.40 ⏱ Palm Springs – Why this score?

41. Synchronicity (2015)

Synchronicity is centred on a man trying to prove to his investor that his time machine works. When he realizes that he has been played and will lose his life’s work, he takes a leap of faith through time. For a detailed explanation, go here –  Synchronicity movie explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.40 ⏱ Synchronicity – Why this rating?

Best Time Travel Movies: 40 to 31

40. the jacket (2005).

The Jacket is a psychological thriller in which a war veteran is wrongfully accused of murder and committed to a mental asylum. One of the doctors employs illegal treatment methods on him that has an unexpected side effect. For the detailed analysis, check out – The Jacket explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.45 ⏱ The Jacket – Why this rating?

39. Retroactive (1997)

Retroactive is a classic 90s action-packed thriller that sports time-loops. The film follows a hostage negotiator who gets a lift from a couple. At once, you know the guy is toxic, and things are going to get crazy… and they do.

BaTTR Score: 2.45 ⏱ Retroactive – Why this rating?

38. The Call (2020)

This is an excellent Korean film that sees two women talking to each other 20 years apart. The information exchange causes cascading effects altering the future in unpredictable ways. The Call is gripping because an ally in one timeline may not remain an ally in another. The film’s plot is why it finds a solid spot in this best time travel movies list. Here’s a detailed explanation for the movie – The Call Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.45 ⏱ The Call – Why this score?

37. Looper (2012)

Looper is a science-fiction action movie that deals with gangs in the future, sending people back to the past to have them executed. Each executor eventually retires when he kills his future self. The film follows the lead character (Gordon-Levitt) who fails to kill his older self (Bruce Willis) and the many consequences that follow. This article, with a detailed timeline diagram, will answer all the questions you have about the film – Looper Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.45 ⏱ Looper – Why this rating?

36. Bill And Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989)

Honestly, we all know that Bill and Ted’s is more a comedy than a time travel flick. That said, the movie has not ignored the causal loop at any point throughout the storyline. A man from the future shows up to help two teenagers pass their history exam by providing them with a time machine. The characters are silly, funny, iconic and bodacious… all at the same time, dude. Some find them too corny, but that was by design and the film sits comfortably in the middle of this time travel list.

BaTTR Score: 2.50 ⏱ Bill And Ted – Why this rating?

35. The Terminator (1984) & 34. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991)

How on earth do iconic blockbusters like T1 and T2 be positioned as low as this, right? Before you judge this list, let’s just ask this question – Were the first two Terminator films primarily time travel movies or where they futuristic action films with a little bit of time travel concepts sprinkled in? Time Travel is not the primary focus of the movies. Both films take place in one time with humans and machines appearing mysteriously from the future, after that it’s full-blown action all the way. Personally, T2 is one of my all-time favourite films that gave Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton a cult status, but comparing with the others on this list, it’s barely a time travel movie. However, a list featuring the best time travel movies would be incomplete without mentioning these two films. Here is the summary of all Terminator films .

BaTTR Score: 2.50 ⏱ Terminator 1 And 2 – Why this rating?

33. ARQ (2016)

ARQ is an infinite time-loop film that has a couple waking up in their house to realize that they have a break-in. The assailants are revealed to be from a corporation from whom the lead character has stolen data. The lead soon realizes that he resets back to the point he woke up each time he dies. Over the various loops that follow, the plot unfolds, and we understand the complex nature of the time cycles. Here is a loop-wise explanation of this film – ARQ Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.60 ⏱ ARQ – Why this score?

32. Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel (2009)

Yeah, Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel is the actual name of the film. And no, it’s not a documentary. The movie is about three socially awkward dudes who go out to grab a drink at the local bar. Unfortunately, the restroom ends up being a coordinate for a time leak sending the guys unexpectedly through erratic points in time.

BaTTR Score: 2.60 ⏱ Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel – Why this rating?

31. 41 (2012)

41 is a hidden gem. It’s an independent film made on a shoestring budget. The plot follows a student who stumbles upon a motel room with a hole in the floor that takes a person back in time by 12 hours. You can watch the full film and read the explanation here – Watch 41 with a detailed analysis . 

BaTTR Score: 2.60 ⏱ 41 – Why this rating?

Best Time Travel Movies: 30 to 21

30. arrival (2016).

People who went to the halls expecting an alien invasion film were most disappointed. Arrival is a science-fiction drama which delves deep into languages and how it affects our thought processes. The story sees a linguist who tries to decode the language used by heptapods who have mysteriously appeared and positioned 12 ships over the world’s major cities. This article analyses the plot in a simplified manner – Arrival Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.65 ⏱ Arrival – Why this rating?

29. The House At The End Of Time (2013) / House Of The Disappeared (2017)

The original is the Venezuelan film  La casa del fin de los tiempos  that released in 2017. It was beautifully remade in Korean in 2017 as  Si-gan-wi-ui jib . These are the original titles, and you can look up the films by their English titles too. The plot revolves around a woman who’s jailed for the murder of her husband and child. She returns after many years to uncover what actually happened. They’re both fantastic films, and you can read the detailed analysis here –  House Of The Disappeared explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.70 ⏱ House Of The Disappeared – Why this rating?

28. La Jetée (1962)

La Jetée is a French science fiction film that presents a convoluted story via a narration over still images. This film inspired the movie 12 Monkeys which took the concept and really did magic with the plot. La Jetée is unique and deserves to be on this list of best time travel movies even though it is a short film.

BaTTR Score: 2.75 ⏱ La Jetée – Why this score?

27. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban (2004)

This is the third film in the Harry Potter series and the only one to feature a little time travel. The story is based around Sirius Black who is the escaped prisoner from Azkaban on his way to the school to kill Harry. While all the other parts of this film-series are completely in the fantasy genre, part 3 played it differently mixing it up with some science fiction and hence finds its way to this best time travel movies list.

BaTTR Score: 2.75 ⏱ Harry Potter – Why this rating?

26. Maanaadu (2021)

Maanaadu is a  time-loop film  that sees a man heading for a wedding getting caught in a political terror attack. The film is predominantly a thriller with some outstanding elements of comedy in the mix.

BaTTR Score: 2.75 ⏱ Maanaadu – Why this rating?

25. A Day / Ha-roo (2017)

A Day is a Korean time-loop film that has a renowned surgeon getting trapped in a loop where he struggles to save his daughter from a repeating accident. As the story progresses, we are introduced more characters and complexity, and finally, the reason for the looping. This Asian film outdoes many of the western productions on this list of best time travel movies. You can read all the details about this film here – A Day Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.75 ⏱ A Day – Why this rating?

24. The Time Machine (1960)

The Time Machine was the first mainstream film adaptation of the book by the same name by the amazing H.G. Wells. The story is about a scientist who narrates his experience of time travel to the future; to the year 802,701. The movie is an excellent adaptation of the book and also adds a good reason to why he lands up in a year so far into the future.

BaTTR Score: 2.75 ⏱ The Time Machine (1960) – Why this score?

23. Edge Of Tomorrow (2014)

Edge Of Tomorrow is a multiple-loop movie based on the Japanese book All You Need Is Kill . The film is centred on a soldier (Tom Cruise) fighting an alien race who resets to a day prior every time he is killed. He eventually runs into a Sergeant (Emily Blunt) who states that she too used to loop. Together they take the fight to the alien species. I must say this film is one of the coolest sci-fi flicks on this list of amazing time travel movies. This article here explains the film and its ending while comparing it to the book – Edge Of Tomorrow Explained .

BaTTR Score: 2.85 ⏱ Edge Of Tomorrow – Why this rating?

22. Frequency (2000)

Frequency sees a man fiddling around with an old radio, and thanks to the strange occurrence of an aurora borealis, he ends up connecting with his father 30 years in the past. 

BaTTR Score: 2.90 ⏱ Frequency – Why this rating?

21. Back To The Future: Part 3 (1990)

This is the third and final instalment of the trilogy by Robert Zemekis. Unlike the first two parts, the film takes place mostly in 1885 and has limited connection to the events back in good ol’ 1985. The story follows the lead characters trying to fight it out in the wild west and travelling back to the future one last time. In case you are wondering why is this iconic film scores so low on this best time travel moves list, don’t worry, this is part 3 we’re talking about.

BaTTR Score: 2.90 ⏱ Back To The Future 3 – Why this score?

Best Time Travel Movies: 20 to 11

20. blink (doctor who 2007 episode).

Blink is an exception, it’s not a film but one episode of the series Dr Who. It’s a standalone episode, and you can watch it even if you haven’t seen any part of the show, which is why it’s on this list of best time travel  movies.  It all begins with one person mysteriously disappearing from a house that has these strange statues called the Weeping Angels.

BaTTR Score: 3.00 ⏱ Blink –  Why this score?

19. Blood Punch (2015)

This is a splendid thriller which involves time-loops. Blood Punch is centred on three people who head to a lonely hunter’s villa in the woods to cook a ton of meth and get caught in perpetuity. It’s an excellent thriller garnished with just the right amount of humour. The filmmakers have really taken the effort to think the concept in the film through. The whole point about a giant time travel films list is to dig up movies like these. Here’s a detailed analysis of the plot and ending – Blood Punch Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.00 ⏱ Blood Punch – Why this score?

18. Donnie Darko (2001)

Donnie Darko follows a troubled young boy who narrowly escapes an aircraft propeller that comes crashing on to his bed. He’s soon met by a man in a bunny suit who claims to be from the future and says the world is soon going to end. For a detailed breakdown of this film and its timeline diagram, go here –  Donnie Darko Explained . Jake Gyllenhaal is so young in this one!

BaTTR Score: 3.00 ⏱ Donnie Darko – Why this score?

17. Source Code (2011)

Source code is a multiple time-loop film where Jake Gyllenhaal’s character is trying to catch the bomber responsible for killing hundreds on a train. Before the terrorist strikes again, the government is trying to identify who he is through a cutting edge technology that allows a person to live multiple iterations of the 8 minutes leading up to the explosion on the train. If you would like to read a loopwise explanation and plot analysis, check this out – Source Code Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.00 ⏱ Source Code – Why this score?

16. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006 Anime)

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time is a 2006 anime is a lovely romantic science-fiction that follows the life of a girl who suddenly gains the ability to jump back in time. While initially, she uses her newfound powers for some frivolous personal reasons, she later learns how she has affected the people around her.

BaTTR Score: 3.10 ⏱ The Girl Who Leapt Through Time – Why this score?

15. Deja Vu (2006)

Déjà Vu is a film centred on a cop who’s trying to locate a terrorist responsible for the bombing of a ferry. With the help of a sophisticated surveillance system that can reconstruct events from 4 days prior, the team follows the life of a woman who was onboard the ferry. The film combines the time travel sub-genre well with a crime thriller and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

BaTTR Score: 3.20 ⏱ Deja Vu – Why this score?

14. Avengers: Endgame (2019)

I’m pretty sure you’re thinking what a comic book movie is doing a list of the best time travel movies at a spot this high. Well, I can’t say this enough but Avengers: Endgame decided to execute a film based on time travel but had to keep in mind there were 20+ movies prior to it that couldn’t in any way be ruined. So not only did the film have to execute a great story based on time travel, it needed to preserve the prequels. Endgame follows the remaining Avengers trying to bring back all the lives that were lost through an elaborate time heist. For a simplified video of the timelines and the plot analysis, read this – Avengers: Endgame Time Travel Explained .  

BaTTR Score: 3.25 ⏱ Avengers: Endgame –  Why this score?

13. Interstellar (2014)

If you’re a Nolan fan [like me], you’re probably wondering why this film doesn’t feature in the top 5 of this top time travel films list. Well, think about it, would you really call Interstellar a time travel movie? Or is it more a grand space-travel science-fiction with elements of time travel? I’d say the latter. Interstellar is a brilliant film set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans are trying to save themselves by leaving Earth. You can read about the details of the plot and the possible plot-holes here – Interstellar Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.25 ⏱ Interstellar – Why this score?

12. Butterfly Effect (2004)

Butterfly Effect is a concept which talks about how a small insignificant event, like the flap of a butterfly’s wings, can cascade and escalate into a giant storm as a result of causality. The film The Butterfly Effect deals specifically with this idea. The lead character experiences blackouts through his younger life and is somehow able to revisit those very moments and make a change to alter the course of reality.

BaTTR Score: 3.30 ⏱ Butterfly Effect – Why the score?

11. Mirage / Durante la tormenta (2018)

Mirage is a Spanish film which combines the sub-genres of a murder mystery and time travel most elegantly. A mysterious storm connects two people 25 years apart in time, and this leads to the unravelling of a murder. For a detailed explanation of the film and its timeline, you can check this out – Mirage Movie Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.35 ⏱ Mirage – Why this score?

Best Time Travel Movies: Top 10

10. twelve monkeys (1995).

A lot of the mainstream time travel movies with big actors tend to focus on elements other than the timeline and eventually make a mess of the plot, but not 12 Monkeys. This Bruce Willis starrer is based on a dystopian future where a strain of a powerful mutating virus kills most of humanity. A small team of scientists figure that the only way to fight it is to send someone back in time to locate the original source and strain of the virus. You can read all about it here in good detail – 12 Monkeys Explained . This popular film also spawned a TV Series by the same name with events running parallel to the film.

BaTTR Score: 3.50 ⏱ 12 Monkeys –  Why this score?

9. The Infinite Man (2014)

Infinite Man is a hidden gem which is centred on a couple celebrating their anniversary and getting caught in a series of time jumps that takes them back by one year. Most lists talking about the awesome time travel movies tend to leave this film out. The tiny-budgeted movie has just three characters and packs quite the punch with both time complexities and humour. Here’s a detailed explanation with a timeline diagram – Infinite Man Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.50 ⏱ The Infinite Man – Why this score?

8. Triangle (2008)

Triangle is a film based on multiple time-loops. A woman and her friends go on a sailing trip and get hit by a storm. Before they drown, they find a cruise ship passing by and get onboard and soon wish they never did. Unlike other time-loop films, Triangle’s loops have an extra dimension of complexity, and this makes it more exciting. Here’s everything you need to know about the movie – Triangle Movie Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.50 ⏱ Triange – Why this score?

7. Tenet (2020)

Christopher Nolan is the father of Nolan-Time. Many of his films portray time in a non-linear format, either as a narrative ( Memento ) or a plot-element ( Inception ). Tenet is Nolan sitting down and thinking, “what can I do in the space of time travel which has never been done before” and delivering just that. In a nutshell, the film is about a group that is trying to protect the world from extremists of the far future, but you know that is an oversimplification. So, here’s a simplified explanation of the film with timeline diagrams – Tenet Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.75 ⏱ Tenet – Why this score?

6. Timecrimes / Los Cronocrímenes (2007)

Timecrimes is a Spanish film that follows one man who accidentally stumbles upon a time machine and travels back in time by merely an hour. In this short time window, he makes life quite miserable for himself. It’s a hilarious flick that needs your focus and attention as the consequences of the time travel are quite messy despite the humour. Here’s is a detailed explanation of the film – Timecrimes Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.75 ⏱ Timecrimes – Why this score?

5. Primer (2004)

Made within a shoestring budget of just $7000, Primer gives many mainstream time travel productions a run for their money. Shane Carruth wore multiple hats in this film like actor, producer, director, and music producer. Not only is the film super-complicated, but it also sports one of the most believable time travel mechanics in the sub-genre. Check out the detailed timeline-wise analysis of the film- Primer Movie Explained .

BaTTR Score: 3.80 ⏱ Primer – Why this score?

4. Predestination (2014)

Anyone who has just finished watching Predestination has the same look as that of a pigeon with massive digestion issues. Based on the short story All You Zombies by Robert A. Heinlein, Predestination presents a plot focused on packing as many impossible scenarios as a human mind can take within one film. Here’s the timeline diagram and detailed explanation – Predestination Movie Explained . This film is easily the most bizarre film on this list of the great time travel films.

BaTTR Score: 4.00 ⏱ Predestination – Why this score?

3. Back To The Future – Part 1 (1985)

This film really raised the bar for all time travel movies. Everything from the characters to the concept of a time machine in a DeLorean makes this film unique to date. The film is a giant bundle of awesomeness and has put a smile on my face each time I’ve watched it since 1985 (yeah, you have to read that in Doc’s voice). We love you Marty McFly, we love you Michael J Fox.

BaTTR Score: 4.30 ⏱ Back To The Future 1 – Why this score?

2. Back To The Future – Part 2 (1989)

Not only did the film create a fresh storyline, but it also beautifully layered itself on top of the complexities of the first part. Marty McFly and Doc Brown are forced to go back to the same date in the past (as they did in the first movie) to undo something terrible. For me, this film really took it to the next level for a sequel. Even Avengers: Endgame mentions this film because of how they revisit some of the older MCU movies. It’s iconic and soars up high in this list of the best time travel movies.

BaTTR Score: 4.50 ⏱ Back To The Future 2 – Why this score?

1. Kimi No Na Wa / Your Name (2016)

Okay, if you haven’t already watched this film, stop reading now. Knowing even the slightest details about this film can potentially spoil it for you. Please return once you’ve watched this phenomenal film.

Kimi No Na Wa is a Japanese anime directed by Makoto Shinkai. It has one of the most captivating visuals and characters. This film takes creativity in the sub-genre of time travel to the next level. It all begins with some mysterious yet harmless body-switching between two people but a while into the film, it all becomes crazy. If you’re looking for the full explanation with a timeline diagram, go here – Your Name Explained .

BaTTR Score: 4.75 ⏱ Your Name – Why this score?

Barry is a technologist who helps start-ups build successful products. His love for movies and production has led him to write his well-received film explanation and analysis articles to help everyone appreciate the films better. He’s regularly available for a chat conversation on his website and consults on storyboarding from time to time. Click to browse all his film articles

The 16 Best Comedy Movies to Inspire Travel

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In these crazy quarantine times, I’ve been watching a ton of movies! I mean what else to do since I’m not traveling? Since the news is so heavy, and life at home can be hard, we have been leaning towards comedic, lighthearted, fun movies to escape the weight of our everyday quarantine lives. So, I decided to share with you all a list of my favorite comedy movies that inspire travel.

Normally, our family does not watch too much TV.  We do have cable, and in normal life, we go old school by taking DVDs out from the library.  But since the stay at home orders, we bought a subscription to Disney+ , and now have a Netflix password thanks to my friend. We also have finally started using Amazon Prime for streaming!

With our increased access to movies,  we have been watching a mix of new movies ( Onward and Trolls World Tour), new to the kids’ movies ( Gremlins , Troop Beverly Hills and Star Wars ) and mixing in some of our favorites listed below!

Comedy Movies to Inspire Travel

I have seen every single one of these ( some multiple times ). As you can see, I like off the beaten path movies, and I hope you find something new both to enjoy at home, and to inspire your next trip!

My favorite travel inspiring comedy movies – in alphabetical order

This 2002 surfer girl movie was filmed on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, with the hotel scenes shot at the JW Marriott Ihilani Resort and Spa, which is now the Four Seasons Oahu at Ko Olina . I love the feel good, girl power aspect of this story, plus the gorgeous Hawaii scenery. Blue Crush is more drama than comedy, there are some funny one-liners here and this movie is pretty light and up lifting. Perfect for quarantine!

KEEP READING: HOW TO PLAN A TRIP TO HAWAII

Couples Retreat – Bora Bora

I just watched Couple Retreat the other night – it seems to be in E!’s regular rotation! This movie follows four couples heading to an all-inclusive resort to have fun, and participate in couples’ therapy! This movie is totally hilarious and I do love that Vince Vaughn. If you have not been to Tahiti/Bora Bora, this movie will make you want to jump on a plane ASAP.

Hubby and I went to Moorea and Bora Bora for our honeymoon in 2007, and the over water bungalow we stayed in was almost the same as what you see Vince Vaughn’s character in! This movie was filmed at the St. Regis in Bora Bora , we stayed at the Bora Bora Pearl .

Worth noting – There is no all-inclusive resort in Tahiti (as they say in the movie). Part of the premise of this movie is that the couples are staying at the fictional Eden West, the couples therapy resort, where the sister property, Eden East, is the party resort. However, there are no party resorts in Tahiti!

Forgetting Sarah Marshall – Oahu, Hawaii

I am literally planning to go to Hawaii next year, to stay at the Turtle Bay Resort , just because of this film! Well, also because its hubby’s sabbatical year and the last time he had one, we did Maui and The Big Island . I have been to Oahu – twice, but not the north shore where Turtle Bay is located.

Anyway, Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a hilarious rom com which begins with the breakup of lead character, Kristen Bell and Jason Segal.  To try to get his now ex, Sarah Marshall, out of his mind, Segal’s character decides to take a solo trip to Hawaii. Where who does he run into? Bell with her new boyfriend, played by Russell Brand. As pathetic as this sounds, this is a romantic comedy and romance, comedy and beautiful Hawaiian scenery ensues!

KEEP READING: HOW TO VISIT HAWAII ON A BUDGET

Hangover 1, 2, 3 – Las Vegas and Thailand

The Hangover is a HILARIOUS movie with great Vegas scenes. We always watch this movie (and Vegas Vacation see below) before a Las Vegas trip!

The trilogy continues in Hangover Part II when the “wolf pack” travels to Thailand for Stu’s wedding, which you know does NOT go seamlessly! But beautiful Thailand scenery – the hotel part was filmed at the Phulay Bay Ritz Carlton in Krabi, and the more I learn about Thailand, the more interested I am in visiting!

The finale in the three-movie saga, The Hangover Part III sees the guys travel down to a fabulous villa in Mexico and then return back to Las Vegas! The scene at the penthouse at Caesar’s Palace is great!

Hunkering down with Stu, Doug, Alan and Phil would be a great way to pass time this quarantine and have some great wanderlust-inducing laughs!

Home Alone 2 – Lost in New York – New York

Technically a Christmas movie, my kids can (and do) watch Home Alone movies all year! Home Alone 1 and 3 (yes there is a third installment, minus Macaulay Caulkin) take place, well at home, but in the second movie in this trilogy, we find Kevin McAllister lost in New York City . He stays at the The Plaza Hotel , and this film shows iconic New York locations like Central Park and the top of the Twin Towers.

My kids also love the Donald Trump cameo – you can’t get more iconic early 90s New York than that!

Hotel Transylvania 3:  Summer Vacation  – Cruise Vacation

This is another family favorite! The third installment in the Hotel Transylvania franchise takes Drac, Mavis, Johnny and the fam on a fabulous cruise vacation ! They travel on a ship called the Legacy, to the lost island of Atlantis! Of course, in true Hotel Transylvania fashion, there is monster/human strife and hilarious Drac scenes! I love Johnny and Mavis – she is like me, always trying to plan fun things for her extended family. Your kids will love this one (even if you haven’t seen the other Hotel Transylvania movies) and will definitely inspire your next cruise vacation .

KEEP READING:  NORWEGIAN GETAWAY TIPS AND TRICKS

My Father the Hero – Bahamas

My Father the Hero is a 1994 film features a very young Katherine Heigl, on vacation with her father, Gerard Depardieu. To prove to a crush she is old and mature ( she is really 14 ) she pretends she is vacationing with her much older boyfriend as opposed to her dad! Yeah, that does sound a little creepy, but of course it all ends happy where this charade strengthens the child/parent bond between them, and the story is just fun.

Of course, the real star here is the fabulous resort they are staying at. Filmed in the Bahamas , at the Paradise Island Resort, which is now the Ocean Club . In fact, some of the hotel amenities needed for the film, were built just for this movie on the Ocean Club property.

KEEP READING: SWIMMING WITH PIGS IN EXUMA, BAHAMAS

Once Upon a Crime – Italy and Monaco

I remember this was one of the first movies I saw in the theatre without my parents. And my young, wander lusting, self just LOVED this film!

Once Upon a Crime is a 1992 mystery movie has a long list of famous cast members. The story revolves around returning a lost dog found in Rome, to her very rich owner in Monaco. Of course, hilarious things ensue along the way!

KEEP READING: THREE DAYS IN MILAN

Sideways – Santa Barbara Wine Country

This is one of hubby and I’s all-time favorite movies. We actually own the DVD and in 2017 took a California road trip planned around a stop at the Hitching Post. Yes, the Hitching Post II is a real restaurant in Buellton, California!

The movie Sideways taps to two of our favorite past-times, travel and wine tasting ! This film is the tale of two men, on a bachelor-party trip to the wine country of Santa Barbara, California. One friend Miles, is total neurotic and very into wine, while the other, Jack, is so painfully laid back. This movie is well-written, witty, and will have you planning your next wine adventure ASAP!

KEEP READING: THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO SANTA CRUZ CALIFORNIA

Summer Rental – Family Beach Vacation

Summer Rental was a childhood favorite, although thinking back this movie is pretty inappropriate for younger children, but it’s so funny! This movie was released in 1985, before PG-13 ratings, so be warned of its PG rating.

This movie is the story of a family, who needs a break from the everyday. So, they decide to rent a beach house in Florida. I didn’t realize this was filmed in St. Pete Beach ( you know I love visiting Clearwater Beach and the Alden Suites in this area). Of course, nothing goes as expected, but this movie always made me want to do a summer beach rental !

KEEP READING:  VISIT THE CLEARWATER AQUARIUM

The Great Outdoors – Family Cabin Trip

The Great Outdoors is another movie starring John Candy! In this one, John Candy is on a rustic cabin vacation with his family (shot in Wisconsin) and in crashes his wife’s sister, and her family, headed by patriarch Dan Ackroyd. With these two actors, you know hilarity will ensue and this film will make you want to book a summer camping trip!

National Lampoon’s Vacation – Road Trip and Theme Park

National Lampoon’s Vacation is the ultimate travel comedy! This 1983 classic stars Chevy Chase as Clark Griswold, the dad ready to hit the road to Wally World. The family takes on a Chicago to California road trip , heading to a fictional theme park with a beloved moose mascot. This movie is raunchy, hilarious and will inspire you to travel across the US!

We did love the 2015 reboot, also named Vacation , but if you have not seen the original, stop reading this and go watch!

KEEP READING: TIPS FOR DRIVING FROM NEW YORK TO FLORIDA

National Lampoon’s European Vacation – London, Paris and Rome

The second film in the franchise rejoins the Griswold family – complete with different actors playing children Rusty and Audrey. In this film, the Griswold family wins a game show, with a grand prize of a fabulous European vacation ! The Griswold’s visit London, Germany, Paris and Rome. The movie was shot in these famous cities and this is a hilarious look at an American family’s adventure in Europe!

KEEP READING: THE BEST COOKING CLASS IN MILAN

Vegas Vacation – Las Vegas

Vegas Vacation is the fourth installment in the Griswold saga (the third being Christmas Vacation). In this movie, the family – again with different actors playing Rusty and Audrey – head to fabulous Las Vegas so Clark and Ellen can renew their wedding vows.

The movie was shot on location at The Mirage Hotel and Casino , and will have you lusting after a Vegas Vacation of your own! We always watch this movie before a Las Vegas trip.

I hope these movies keep your quarantine fun and will inspire your next vacation! What are your favorite comedy movies that inspire travel? What are you watching during this stay at home season?

Looking to book your next trip? Then reach out to me, I am a full-service travel planner. I do know the one good thing to come out of travel cancellations in the Spring of 2020 is folks will be more apt to use a travel planner going forward!

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Things to do in venice with kids, icon of the seas review: is the new royal caribbean ship worth the hype, sandals grande st. lucian review, 26 comments to “the 16 best comedy movies to inspire travel”.

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That moment when you realize you haven’t seen half of the movies! Guess I know what I’ll be doing this weekend!

Hotel Transylvania and Home Alone are by far my favorite but I’m really curious to watch The Hangover! I never know the references people are talking about.

I love the first one. Its on E! all the time. I have not seen the 2nd or 3rd ones in a while. Might be time for a three night movie marathon!

What a great line up! I’m surprised at how many of these I’ve actually seen!

I’ve seen a lot of these, but there are are a few I haven’t and need to check out. Great suggestions!

I need to re-watch some. Maybe w the kids, maybe without. You have to be careful of the PG ratings from the 90s, before PG-13 was a thing!

Such a great list of movies here! Vacation will forever be on my top 10!

Kileen cute & little

totally a classic! And I didnt mind the reboot – thought it was funny too!

This is such a great list of movies, some of them I haven’t seen so I’ll put them on my to watch list xx

This is such a fun list! I love Sideways and some of the others here. However, there are some ones that I still need to check out!!

Sideways has been a favorite for some time! Hubby and I love wine, and California. I need to find the pics of us at the Hitching Post II

Sideways is such a great movie! I’ll have to give it a rewatch soon.

So many great choices! I need to watch more John Candy movies with my kids, those are some of the best!

I know, right! He is such a legend!

Oh my…I love so many of these movies! The Hangover, The Great Outdoors, and Home Alone are my faves! Thanks for sharing this fun and unique post!

I know! Travel or not, these are great movies to add to your quarantine watch list!

I chuckled at the memories of all these movies, they are all lovely movies and my most recent favourite one is Hotel Transylvania. Also, yes it will inspire my next cruise vacation. Thanks for sharing.

We love all the hotel transylvanias!

OMG I forgot how awesome some of these movies are!! We love Couples Retreat, The Hangover, and Home Alone…and can’t we all use a laugh right now. Great roundup- saving for later!!

Home Alone is a Christmas movie IMO, but my kids can watch it anytime. Plus in the quarantine times, who cares!

I too forgot how amazing these movies are. I keep forgetting about Sideways, putting that on my watch list for the weekend.

we love that one! we got that dvd from a garage sale!

Such a great list of travel comedies! These are some of my favorite movies.

me too! I have seen all of these – some many times!

I haven’t watched half of these movies. Thanks for sharing. I have some good options to watch during quarantine! 🙂

Do it! These all are highly recommended by yours truly! 🙂

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20 Most Confusing Time Travel Movies Ever Made

From inter-timeline disasters to sillier comedies with absurd sci-fi concepts, these movies may be unclear with time travel but are definitely fun!

Hollywood has brought us some of the most amazing stories over the years, but few are quite as mind-bending and exhilarating as those involving time travel. Filmmakers have tried their hand in literally everything the concept has to offer – from moving forward and backward in time to crossing over into alternate realities. And while some movies just make sense, many others drop the ball by never addressing the basic rules and paradoxes associated with messing with the space-time continuum. Resulting in utter confusion and bewilderment.

Related: These are the Best Movies that Got Time Travel Right

While time travel movies aim to entertain audiences, they sometimes end up being hard to follow. And that’s mainly because time travel itself is very hard to properly put into practice in a cinematic environment. From harmless choices to greater disasters, many movies leave massive plot holes unaddressed, while many others take a casual approach to the science behind the premise .

Regardless of the method, the result is some of the greatest films about time travel that offer baffling experiences. After all, the thrill of watching characters traverse through eons and eras is unrivaled. Even if we are left scratching our heads and grasping out straws to make sense of all the plot twists and gaps in logic. So, without further ado, here is a list of some of the most confusing yet highly watchable movies involving time travel.

20 Mirage (2018)

One of the most unique murder mysteries ever made, Mirage is a Spanish-language film that combines the elements of a crime thriller with time travel, and it does so impeccably. The movie follows Vera, a mother who ends up saving the life of a child in a storm that occurred 25 years ago. But her tempering causes a glitch in the space-time continuum, which takes her daughter from her, and now she must solve the case and reverse the event. The movie uses props like a TV acting as a portal between the past and the present, facts and clues from two decades ago that act as clues to uncover a larger, more sinister detail. Director Oriol Paulo has a seasoned hand in creating movies with altered realities and shifting timelines, and his 2018 project only cements his talent in the genre. Plus, we have Álvaro Morte, whom fans know from the renowned Netflix series Money Heist.

19 The Infinite Man (2014)

This complicated time loop movie centers around a man’s desire to recreate special moments with his girlfriend. Being a scientist, Dean has all the means to make this anniversary weekend similar to the last and equally memorable. But what he does not expect is that his little fiddling would lead Lana into an infinite time loop, and the two would come face to face with multiple versions of themselves from the past. Wicked and charming, this Australian low-budget science fiction movie is not only high in its concept but also delivers crazy humor with its disorienting premise. The Infinite Man achieves a lot with just three actors – Josh McConville, Hannah Marshall, and Alex Dimitriades – and almost no special effects or over-the-top performances, making it one of the more underrated comedies in the genre.

18 Primer (2004)

Primer is an extraordinarily cerebral independent time-travel film written and directed by Shane Carruth. Produced with a shoestring budget of $7k, it follows a group of engineers, Aaron, Abe, Phillip, and Robert, working on creating an error-checking machine but accidentally inventing a device that allows them to travel back in time. Obsessed with this new origination, they use it to get advanced knowledge on the stock market and make inadvertent changes to alter the present and the future. What follows is a spiral of paradoxes and alternate timelines. The movie relies heavily on technical jargon to explain the plot, which may leave the audience dazed. But due to its many artistic merits, Primer succeeds in creating a truly original take on the time travel genre.

17 Summer Time Machine Blues (2005)

A rather unknown entry on the list, Summer Time Machine Blues is a Japanese indie time travel comedy that follows four college students who use a time travel machine to retrieve a remote control after the air conditioner in the present breaks down and the summer heat gets unbearable. The movie is filled with amusing shock gags which appeal not only to fans of science fiction but also to people who simply enjoy nonsensical humor. As the students confront technology and travel back and forth, things get way too complicated. However, the movie focuses more on the comedic scenarios than crafting a coherent of logical time travel storyline, which seems to work well because the audience is left feeling exhilarant and nostalgic as they long for a carefree summer break.

16 X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014)

The X-Men franchise is widespread, and the movies range from dull to spectacular. X-Men: Days of Future Past falls on the better side of this spectrum as the superhero time travel adventure follows Wolverine's consciousness sent back to the 1970s by the X-Men. The mission? To stop Mystique from killing Bolivar Trask, as it would lead to the destruction of mutants. While the time travel itself feels pretty straightforward, it’s Wolverine’es functioning as a surrogate for the audience that truly elevates the experience. There are also notions of free will and fate involved, as Logan’s actions sharply alter the events of history. It seems like the story plays it safe rather than diving into the conceptual details, which also results in some loose threads. But overall, the movie is an enjoyable flick that relies on visual thrills and character drama.

Related: X-Men: Was Days of Future Past the Best Movie in the Franchise?

15 12 Monkeys (1995)

Director Terry Gilliam draws inspiration from the 1962 short film by Chris Marker to create this imaginative time travel tale. In 12 Monkeys , Bruce Willis stars as a time traveler sent back from a dystopian future to gather information about a virus that wipes out most of mankind. The twisted narrative revolves around an animal rights group called the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and Willis’ increasingly confused journey as he struggles to differentiate between what is real and what isn’t. While the movie is overly imbued with separate incidents about predestination and fate that later turn into a surprisingly poetic vision of time as the pieces fall into place. With strong performances and Gilliam’s visually striking direction, the movie slowly narrows down the confusion.

14 Timecrimes (2007)

Nacho Vigalondo’s excellently clever Spanish thriller follows a single timeline, with events that occur during one day . Timecrimes follows the protagonist, Héctor snooping on a woman on his property, shortly after which he discovers that she has been assaulted. The same bandage-faced man then targets Héctor, who hides in a time machine, which sends him a few hours in the past to observe himself throughout the day. The simple yet effective premise allows the filmmakers to explore the mind-bending concept of time as well as the idea of a person interacting with their past self. The confusion comes from Héctor’s character, who never intended to travel back. Told in a gripping pace of twisted reveals, Timescrimes leaves the audience in a constant state of awe but still keeps them invested throughout.

13 The Butterfly Effect (2004)

Ashton Kutcher stars in The Butterfly Effect as Evan, who is perturbed by constant headaches and often blacks out. But when he’s unconscious, he develops the ability to travel back into his own memories and alter the events of the past. The movie examines how even the tiniest chances in the past can affect the present in unexpected, monumental ways. The premise of the story actually explores the chaos theory, which suggests that order often moves to disorder and vice versa. As for the story, it quickly devolves into an increasingly illogical series of events as Kutcher’s protagonist, Evan, tries to mend his personal and professional relationships. While the movie did receive a lot of appreciation, many believe that the mind-bender had more potential for success had it delivered better psychological thrills.

12 Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989)

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure is a wacky comedy that follows two rock-and-roll slackers who travel through time to assemble historical figures like Socrates, Billy the Kid, and Joan of Arc for their school project. At the same time, they also save the world. The movie is very, very light-hearted in its approach toward time travel, focusing more on the silly hijinks and vintage gags rather than explaining how a phone booth sent for the future acts as a device that sends them cruising around centuries. Rufus, the guy who acts as an anchor for Bill and Ted, has a confusing arc because he reveres their music in the future, but they only end up making the music after he steps into the past. As such, the movie serves more as a fun diversion than food for thought.

11 Planet of the Apes (2001)

The 1968 classic sci-fi directed by Franklin J. Schaffner gave the audience a first glimpse of time travel and its effect, but we’re talking about 2001’s Planet of the Apes reboot by Tim Burton, which took the original movie’s basic storyline and went crazy with it. Starring Mark Wahlberg as Leo, an astronaut who lands on a planet where apes rule the humans, the movie switches directions from the original as soon as he provokes the humans to take a stand against the intelligent apes. When matters get out of hand, he returns to the present and discovers that his Earth is now occupied by apes too. Which just complicates things further. Because the story relies heavily on spectacle over science, it fails to craft a genuine portrait of evolution, intelligence, and the dangers posed by the same.

Related: 20 Most Iconic Scenes From the Planet of the Apes Movies

10 Looper (2012)

Looper charts the story of an assassin who works for organized crime, and his job as a ‘looper’ is to kill targets set back in time from the future. Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt both play the protagonist, Joe, in this neo-noir thriller. The unforeseen complication in Joe’s profession arises when his younger and aged version comes face to face to close the loop, which means killing themselves. The film showcases a vivid vision of a dystopian future while also exploring how the same future can create greater dents in society. Director Rian Johnson uses artistic visuals to help distract the audience from narrative confusion, making the movie ultimately enjoyable – if not entirely sensible.

9 Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)

Directed by Leonard Nimoy, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is as adventurous and entertaining as it is bizarre. Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise travel back to 1980s Earth to retrieve humpback whales whose sounds can save the planet from a dangerous probe in the future. The movie is quite laid-back for time travel, and it serves primarily as comedic fodder for the franchise. First of all, the crew sling-shots itself around the sun to reach Earth and back, even though their ship is fast. Second, they bring the whales with them instead of just making sure their species does not go extinct. So, while there is a lack of any substantive exploration, the movie seems rather frivolous and confusing from the time travel aspect. However, for undemanding fans who only want to see their beloved characters shine in a new setting, the movie delivers plenty of that good old Trek fun.

8 Terminator: Dark Fate (2019)

Far better than Terminator: Genisys , this latest entry in the Terminator franchise sees a new and advanced Terminator sent from the future to kill a young woman who holds the key to humanity's survival. The original move was already complicated with the whole deal of Connor and Reese chasing their own tail. But this one takes the familiar action thrills and time travel tropes to up the ante, and without breaking much new ground narratively, create a maze around Schwarzenegger’s terminator and a new cyborg sent by Legion. With dazzling special effects that are entertaining but never enlightening, Terminator: Dark Fate makes you think out loud because of its straining credulity. While it may not have rivaled the game-changing impact by others, it delivers enough pulpy thrills to keep fans satisfied.

7 Predestination (2014)

Based on the short story All You Zombies, Predestination is a complex time travel that follows a Temporal Agent sent on a mission to stop a terrorist from destroying the entirety of New York City in 1975. On one hand, the movie is emotionally gripping and on the other, it features numerous twists that arrest the viewers and offers them an understanding of the characters’ pasts, presents, and futures. The intricately layered narrative gives rise to more logical and confusing leaps in time and we find ourselves struggling to follow the story’s progression. Still, Michael and Peter Spierig’s clever writing as sharp performances from Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook, and Noah Taylor help sustain interest as every element of this abundantly convoluted film comes together into the most satisfying ending.

6 Déjà Vu (2006)

Denzel Washington stars as Doug, an ATF agent who travels back four days in time to solve a terrorist attack that led to a ferry explosion and save a woman's life. Simple and interesting, right? Well, the reason Doug is able to achieve this is by following the life of a victim and getting close to the person responsible. However, when the FBI warns Doug of the end result remaining the same regardless of whether or not he finds the bomber, he’s left with no choice but to alter history itself. The flashy action thriller relies heavily on spectacle and drama while glossing over the conceptual difficulties of its premise. However, it does assimilate all the timeless into one fine ending and wraps things up pretty neatly, ensuring Déjà Vu a place in the growing pantheon of unforgettable time travel movies.

Related: Time Travel Was Totally Unrealistic in These Movies

5 Source Code (2011)

From the very start of Source Code , the audience is sucked into a black hole of repetitive circumstances and narrative convolution. The compelling thriller follows Colter Stevens, an army pilot who is given charge of a top-secret mission where he has to repeatedly travel back in time for 8 minutes to uncover details about a train bombing. Played by Jake Gyllenhaal, Stevens is as confused by the mysterious trail as the audience. The puzzling, science-based approach tries to elevate the intrigue created by its Hitchcockian opening sequence, and it also manages to achieve part of it. But seeing Stevens pop in and out and train and comprehend gets straining. Still, with a taut mystery and great premise, the film launches important questions about fate.

4 Back To The Future: Part 2 (1989)

After the stunning success of the franchise’s 1985 debut, Robert Zemeckis returns with another incredible story with Back To The Future: Part 2 . The sequel sees Marty McFly and Doc Brown travel to 2015, where they must repair the damage caused by Biff's alterations to history. As light-hearted as the adventure may seem, it does treat its time travel in a silly manner because most of the events in the second movie take place on the same date as the first. There are also instances where Doc references the first movie. With little concern for logical consistency (except for that one blackboard explanation), the movie delivers plenty of laughs and nostalgic entertainment. It proves to be a classic 80s teen adventure gone futuristic with a narrative that is fun by ultimately zany.

3 Avengers: Endgame (2019)

Avengers: Endgame carried on after the jarring yet entertaining events of Avengers: Infinity War and graced the big screen with another phenomenal spectacle of a film where the remaining Avengers travel back in time to reverse Thanos’ actions and save half the universe. The time travel concept used here presents complications that challenge even the great minds of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner.

Even though their rules are coherent – that altering any event in the past will not affect the original timeline but instead form a different fracture of a timeline where the altered event remains thorough – the narrative still isn’t able to create a multiverse that does not collapse under its own paradoxical weight. However, the massive set pieces, emotional character dynamics, and mind-blowing action scenes help distract from any conceptual shortcomings, and of course, Endgame remains a rousing end to over a decade's worth of Marvel storytelling.

2 Donnie Darko (2001)

A movie that may have been a box office failure upon release, Donnie Darko has now earned the status of a cult classic because of its presentation of traumatized teens in a way that is neither patronizing nor stereotypical. Following Jake Gyllenhaal’s titular character, a troubled high-schooler who begins seeing visions of a man in a sinister bunny costume, the movie circles around how he ends up committing various destructive acts after telling him that the world will end in 28 days. The psychological thriller is brimming with inexplicable and growingly complex time travel elements that are hard to follow. Plus, there is this whole dreamlike quality in every frame of the nonlinear storyline that leaves many mysteries unsolved. Despite never fully providing an explanation, Donnie Darko succeeds as a haunting movie that explores mental illness and adolescence.

1 Interstellar (2014)

In Interstellar , Matthew McConaughey stars as an ex-NASA pilot, Joseph Cooper, who travels through a wormhole in search of a plate to sustain humanity after Earth becomes uninhabitable. Directed by Christopher Nolan, the movie takes a grounded approach and scientific rigor to help make the time travel feel genuine and emotionally resonant. His meticulous attention to detail and accurate application of scientific concepts, as well as the portrayal of time on a planet where one hour equals seven years on Earth, may bewilder fans. But to help, the movie tackles themes of love across time and space and uses character depth and visually striking storytelling that keeps the audience engaged.

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Movie Nights at Home

- Snacks & Ideas for Families, Friends & Couples

70+ Funny Family Vacation & Travel Comedy Movies

Family vacation movies are hilarious because they’re relatable! Get ready to laugh with these comedy travel movies family movie night! With 74 to choose from, you can find something you all will like!

Family vacations are tried and true traditions. But who needs to go on a trip when you can watch a movie instead? The next time your family is itching for a vacation, turn on one of these fun comedy travel movies!

Everyone in the family will love the hilarious hijinks found in each of these comedy travel movies, but keep in mind some of these family vacation movies are rated PG-13 or R.

The Best Family Comedy Travel Movies

When it comes to finding fun family movies, it doesn’t get much better than a classic vacation story. From vacations gone awry to cute family connections, there are so many amazing stories that come with a family trip.

Check out these funny family travel movies to take a trip during your next movie night at home.

Robin William’s RV has to be one of the best family road trip movies! It’s about an overworked man decides to take his family on a last-minute RV trip to Colorado, hoping they won’t discover that he’s actually going there for a business meeting.

This 2-ingredient dirt cake is a great dessert to pair with this movie too!

2. Guilt Trip

Rated PG-13

After an inventor makes a quick stop at his mom’s house before heading out on a once-in-a-lifetime voyage, the vacation turns into an unexpected mother-son road trip.

This is one of my favorite travel movies because both main characters are so hilarious!

3. Hotel Transylvania

Take a trip to Hotel Transylvania, where monsters can enjoy some time away and no humans are allowed.

4. Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

After spending summers together as kids, four friends go their separate ways for a few months, but a magical pair of pants keeps them connected during each of their trips.

Another one of our favorite movies with great views is Mamma Mia! Don’t forget to check out 17 Best Movies About Greece to Watch Tonight.

5. Toy Story 4

Before Bonnie starts kindergarten, her mom and dad take her and her favorite toys on a road trip in the family RV. But when one of the toys gets lost, it’s up to Woody and the gang to save him.

You can also grab  Free Disney Movie Coloring Pages & Printables for the Kids!

After casting a magic spell, two brothers have the chance to spend the day with their late dad. But after a mishap, they must go on a quest to find a gem to finish the spell before time runs out.

7. Diary of A Wimpy Kid: The Long Haul

Take a trip with your favorite book family – the Heffleys – as they head out on a road trip for their grandma’s 90th birthday party.

8. The Great Outdoors

This has to be one of the best, classic comedy travel movies!

When a fun-loving Chicago dad takes his family on a relaxing vacation at a lakeside resort, things take a turn for the worse when his in-laws show up unannounced.

You could also make it a big movie night outside. Here’s What You Need to Host an Outdoor Movie Night!

9. National Lampoon’s Vacation

Chevy Chase pretty much invented the best family vacation movies!

While this road trip comedy isn’t a great option for families with young children, your teens are sure to have a blast watching the Griswolds head out on a cross country comic adventure to Wally World – only the best amusement park!

10. Are We There Yet?

While dating a divorced mother, a playboy bachelor must take her kids on a comic road trip to Canada to visit her at work.

11. Home Alone 2: Lost in New York

While on a family Christmas vacation, a young boy gets accidentally left alone in New York City.

You also have to have Kevin Mcallister’s massive ice cream sundae with it!

12. College Road Trip

A teenager and her dad travel around the country looking for the perfect college for her in this family-friendly travel movie.

13. Johnson Family Vacation

A family man takes his wife and teenage children on a road trip across the country to a family reunion.

14. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle

A group of unlikely friends must travel the jungle and complete dangerous challenges after they get sucked into a video game.

15. Spiderman Far From Home

While this is a little different pick to include in our comedy travel movies, it’s a great option for Marvel fans!

During a school trip to Europe, Peter Parker must battle a new villain and save his friends from danger.

16. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

An ordinary man must find the courage to turn his vibrant fantasy life into reality to discover his destiny when his job at Life Magazine is going to be dissolved. 

Ben Stiller is incredible in this movie, and we really love the beautiful scenery and different areas in this movie too!

17. Journey to the Center of the Earth

Three adventurers travel to a new realm beneath the Earth’s surface, where they go on a voyage to find hidden treasure.

18. Journey 2: The Mysterious Island

The sequel to Journey to the Center of the Earth finds a teen and his stepfather on an epic adventure to find a lost island.

Moana must set sail on an adventure to save her people from the mighty demigod Maui. 

We also have Moana-themed recipes and activities for a family movie night you may like!

20. Alvin and the Chipmunks Road Chip  

Alvin, Simon, and Theodore hit the road to Miami to save their family, all while singing and dancing along the way.

21. Paddington

During a trip to London, a talking bear must avoid a museum taxidermist and becomes a member of the family.

22. National Treasure

On a hunt for the Nights Templar treasure, a historian works his way through historical monuments around the country to uncover clues.

23. Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey

When a group of pets’ owners leave and never return, the friends must work together to travel across the country to find them.

24. Jungle Cruise

While on the hunt for an ancient tree with healing abilities, a doctor joins forces with a boat captain to battle supernatural forces and dangerous enemies.

25. Cheaper by the Dozen 2

After they go on a family trip to a remote resort, this family of 12 must pit themselves against another family to see who can have the best vacation.

Each of one of these great travel movies can transport you to another place and most of them are also funny!

During a visit to an out-of-the-way beach, a family begins to rapidly age. They must work together to find a way out if they ever hope to return home.

27. Murder Mystery

A New York cop and his wife take a European vacation to rekindle their marriage and soon find themselves in the middle of a murder plot in this travel comedy.

28. The Addams Family 2

After noticing just how much their children have grown up, Gomez and Morticia pack the entire family into their haunted camper to take a trip they’ll never forget.

29. A Goofy Movie

When Goofy plans a fishing trip for him and his son, he hopes for some father-son bonding time. But things quickly go awry, resulting in a goofy cross-country adventure.

30. It Takes 2

While on vacation at summer camp, an orphaned tomboy and wealthy heiress meet and discover they’re twins who were separated at birth. The two quickly devise a plan to bring their single parents together so they can be sisters again.

31. Roman Holiday

Exhausted from her overwhelming schedule, a European princess takes off on an adventure through Rome on her own. After falling asleep on a park bench, she’s rescued by an American reporter hoping to cash in on a big story. But after enjoying the city together, the pair find love instead.

32. The Parent Trap (1998)

After growing up on separate coasts, a pair of twins meet for the first time during a trip to summer camp. While together, they devise a plan to reunite their parents so they can be a family again.

33. Unchartered

A seasoned treasure hunter teams up with a street-smart teen to uncover the location of a lost city of gold. The pair must work together to decipher a set of clues before another more ruthless treasure hunter can get his hands on the treasure.

A mermaid boy discovers he has legs when he reaches land, sparking an epic journey above the water filled with pasta, boat races, and friendship.

35. Finding Nemo

After a young clownfish is captured in the Great Barrier Reef and transported to an aquarium in a dentist’s office, it’s up to his cautious father and forgetful friend to save him.

36. Finding Dory

Forgetful fish Dory is living happily in the reef with her friend Nemo when she suddenly remembers a family she left behind. The memories spark a journey across the ocean to find the fish’s lost family.

37. The Muppet Movie

Kermit the Frog decides to take a chance on Hollywood and packs up his belongings to go on a cross-country road trip to California. Along the way he meets his Muppet friends, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, and others.

A retired balloon salesman decides to leave his old life behind by attaching hundreds of balloons to his home. When the house takes flight, he finds he has a stowaway – a young Wilderness Explorer and his dog. 

39. Madagascar

A group of zoo animals, including a lion, giraffe, hippo, and zebra, grow tired of living life in captivity. After devising a plan, the group make their escape from the zoo to explore the real world. But they get more than they bargain for when they wind up in the jungle.

40. The Croods

When their cave home is destroyed, a prehistoric family must set out on a journey together to find a new home and avoid extinction.

41. Mr. Bean’s Holiday

When he wins a trip to France, Mr. Bean faces a series of misunderstandings that leads him to accidentally separate a boy from his father. The two must work together to reunite the family.

While on his way to his next big race, race car Lightning McQueen takes a detour and gets stranded in a roadside town off the beaten path. With the help of his new friends, he gets back on the road and learns that sometimes it’s better to slow down and enjoy the ride.

43. The Loud House Movie

When the Louds discover they have family living in Scotland, the large family unit takes a trip across the ocean to learn more about their heritage. The group soon finds out they’re descendants of royalty, making them wonder whether they want to leave their old life behind.

44. Little Miss Sunshine

A dysfunctional family hits the road in their run-down VW van to get their daughter to California to take part in the Little Miss Sunshine Contest. 

45. Finding Ohana

When a pair of Brooklyn siblings take a summer trip to Oahu, they uncover a journal leading them to a long-lost treasure. The ensuing adventure helps them connect with new friends and their Hawaiian heritage while in pursuit of the gold.

46. The Way Way Back

When an awkward teen is forced to spend his summer on a beach vacation with his mom and her boyfriend, he immediately looks for a way out. After scoring a job at a nearby water park, he finds the family he’s been searching for.

47. We’re the Millers

This hilarious film is one that earns it’s R rating, but it’s definitely a great family vacation movie.

After attempting to help a teen, a small-time drug dealer is robbed of his stash and his cash. To pay back his supplier, he agrees to transport the latest shipment of pot across the Mexican border. He enlists the help of his neighbor and two wayward teens to act as a family on vacation in order to safely make the deal in this teen-friendly comedy.

48. What About Bob

Right before heading out on his family vacation, a psychiatrist takes on a new patient suffering from paralyzing neediness and phobias. After his appointment, the patient follows his new doctor to the family’s country house and invites himself on their trip, annoying the doctor and charming the rest of the family in the process.

49. Weekend at Bernie’s

Two salesmen are invited to spend a weekend at their boss’s beach house. But when they arrive, they soon discover they’re the fall guys for a fraud plan gone wrong, resulting in their boss’s death. Instead of reporting the murder, the pair decide to make the most of their weekend and enjoy their time at the beach with their dead boss in tow.

50. Strange World

A family of explorers find themselves in an uncharted land filled with strange creatures. In order to survive, they must work together with their rag-tag team, including a three-legged dog and a mischievous blob.

51. Ticket to Paradise

A divorced couple take a trip to Bali to celebrate their daughter’s wedding. But as they work together to sabotage the nuptials and stop their daughter from making the same mistake they did, the couple starts to rekindle old feelings for each other.

52. Frozen II

Sisters Ana and Elsa must travel together with their sidekicks Sven and Olaf to the enchanted forest to uncover hidden family secrets that could save their beloved Arrendelle.

53. Gulliver’s Travels

While on assignment in the Bermuda Triangle, a newspaper mailroom clerk is transported to a magical land filled with tiny people. The island people use his large size to their advantage to defeat their enemy and save their land.

54. The Wizard of Oz

After a tornado rips through her Kansas home, Dorothy is transported on a trip to a magical land. In order to make her way back home, she must work with her new friends to find the wizard and escape the wicked witch.

55. The Lizzie McGuire Movie

LIzzie McGuire enjoys a class trip to Rome over summer break where she meets an Italian singer that looks and acts just like her. Lizzie agrees to step in for the musical sensation at her next concert, but when things go awry, she must rely on her own talents to keep the show going. 

56. Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

In a race against the Nazis, an adventurous archeologist seeks out an ancient religious relic. He must travel across dangerous terrain and battle countless foes to keep the Ark out of the wrong hands.

57. Into the Wild

After graduating from college, a young man gives all his money to charity, rids himself of his possessions, and hitchhikes to the Alaskan wilderness in this coming of age story.

58. The Beach

Hoping to disconnect from the stresses of the modern world, a young American backpacker travels to Thailand looking for an adventure. When he’s given a map to a mysterious secluded beach, he jumps at the chance to enjoy life off the grid in what he believes is an island paradise.

An Army Ranger and a service dog named Lulu take a road trip down the Pacific coast in hopes of making it to a fellow soldier’s funeral on time. After driving him crazy most of the trip, the soldier soon begins to bond with his fury companion.

60. Chasing Liberty

While on a trip to Prague, the daughter of the President of the United States eludes her Secret Service detail. While out and about in the city, she meets a handsome boy who whisks her away on a tour of Europe.

61. The Fundamentals of Caring

A disabled teen sets out on a road trip with her caregiver where they bond over shared tragedy while searching for unique landmarks along the way.

62. Night at the Museum Secret of the Tomb

After learning that his museum friends have been shipped to the Smithsonian Institution, a former museum security guard is forced to take a trip abroad to protect his historic pals from four of history’s greatest villains who have come to life to take over the museum.

63. The Bucket List

Two terminally ill men decide to leave their hospital room against doctor’s wishes in order to embark on a trip to check everything off their bucket list before their time is up.

Best Family Vacation Movies

If you’re looking for more family vacation movies or just funny movies about traveling, we have you covered!

The best part? Most of these comedy travel movies are on Amazon Prime so that you can stream them easily! 

64. Blended

After a disastrous blind date, a divorced mom and widowed dad find themselves at the same South African resort with their families. When both families are forced to share the same suite, the two start to develop an undeniable connection.

65. Just Go With It

A plastic surgeon devises a plan to pretend to be married in order to enjoy commitment-free relationships. But after meeting his dream girl at a party, he enlists his assistant to act as his soon-to-be-ex to show her he’s available.

66. Dirty Dancing

While on a summer trip to the Catskills with her parents, a young woman falls in love with her rebellious dance instructor.

67. National Lampoon’s European Vacation

When he wins an all expenses paid European vacation on a game show, Clark Griswold packs up his family and heads overseas. But the family encounters one mishap after another as they travel through England, Germany, and Italy.

68. National Lampoon’s Vegas Vacation

The Griswold family is off on another trip – this time to Las Vegas. But when the family vacation turns into one mishap after another, the group decides to go their separate ways and enjoy Vegas on their own. Trouble quickly ensues and the Griswolds must come together as a family to make it out of Vegas on top.

69. Captain Ron

After learning he has inherited a yacht, a mild mannered dad brings his family to the Caribbean for a beach vacation. When they arrive, they discover the yacht is in bad shape and hire free-spirited Captain Ron to sail the family back to Miami on the ship.

70. Mad Families

Three families from very different backgrounds are forced to share the same campsite over Fourth of July weekend in this vacation comedy.

71. Grown Ups

When their former basketball coach dies, a group of childhood friends reunite at a 4th of July celebration to remember their coach and reminisce about the fun they had as kids.

72. The Mitchells vs. the Machines

A family’s road trip vacation gets interrupted when electronic devices around the world take on a life of their own. With the help of two friendly robots, the family is forced to fight against the evil devices to save themselves and save the world.

73. Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation

Mr. Hobbs dreams of a trip to the beach alone with his wife. But when his wife insists on a family trip to a beach house he grudgingly agrees. The entire family comes together at a run-down cottage, bringing all their problems along with them. In order to enjoy his trip, Hobbs must help each family member overcome their issues one by one.

74. Summer Rental

After losing a plane, a stressed-out air traffic controller is forced to take a break from work. So, he books a week at a plush resort for his family. They soon find out their resort leaves a lot to be desired, and the trip only goes downhill from there.

We hope this list of best vacation and comedy travel movies helped you find something to watch with your best friend or family members!

If you love these comedy travel movies, you may also like:

• 25 Fun Family Movie Night Dinner Ideas
• 195+ Best Family Movie Night Ideas to Watch With Your Kids
• 25 Best Comedy Movies for Tweens (10-14 Year Olds Approved)
• 50 Movies to Watch With Your Dad

Love Disney? Check out  35+ Easy Disney Movie Night Dinner & Dessert Ideas.

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