Christopher Nolan's Tenet is here at last, and its tricksy manipulation of the flow of time and space has probably got you in the mood for some more great time travel films.

That doesn't just mean jumping in a Delorean and bombing it back to 1955. Cinema has used time-travel, looping storylines and repeating events for more than a century, starting with The Ghost of Slumber Mountain in 1918 and Emmett J Flynn's 1921 adaptation of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.


Those early incarnations both explain characters' travels with the old 'it was all a dream!' trick (it's not a spoiler if the film is a century old), which was as irritating in 1918 as it is now. HG Wells's idea of using some sort of craft to surf through time's crests, as in his 1895 novel The Time Machine, didn't filter through to cinema until the Forties. Before then, it seems like all you had to do was fall asleep in the wrong place and bang – you're back in 1790, pal.

Now, though, we expect our time-bending films to have at least some nod to theoretical physics. Some are built on self-consciously hard sci-fi logic, some only give the technical aspects the very merest of wibbly-woo glosses. But, much like Tenet itself, the key to time travel is not to overthink it. Just enjoy the ride.

Tenet (2020)

preview for Tenet – new trailer (Warner Bros)

Tenet is a film in which Christopher Nolan explains theoretical physics to a backdrop of explosions and how-the-hell-did-he-do-that car chases. Think of it like the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, but with a $200m budget. The director has explicitly said that this is not a time travel film, but the concept of time is both its good guy and bad guy, which more than earns it a spot on this list. Confused? By the ending of Tenet, you definitely will be. But it's a very fun ride.

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Arrival (2016)

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Denis Villeneuve's alien invasion film is a spiritual successor to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, far more interested in communication and understanding than your usual death, destruction and imminent end of humanity. Close Encounters' sense of wonder runs right through it, as Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner try to work out what the intergalactic blobs are trying to tell us all before the military rolls in to ruin everything. They're running out of time, but time turns out to be what they were looking for all along. Beautiful, cerebral stuff.

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Your Name (2016)

This Japanese animation jumps not just between timelines, but across space and, most surprisingly for country girl Mitsuha and Tokyo boy Taki, bodies. It's ambitious and complex, but at its heart it's a big-hearted teen romance. Two high-schoolers suddenly find that they're waking up in each other's bodies, and have to work out a way of keeping each other's lives on track for the time that they're crossed over. They get closer and closer. But then, wouldn't you know it, an asteroid turns up and flattens half the country. There must be a way out. Mustn't there?

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Back to the Future (1985)

Well, obviously. It's impossible to pick a greatest film of all time, but if you're talking about which film is most rewarding to watch and rewatch and rewatch, it's probably Back to the Future. The more you see it, the more you see in it. The script is a shining thing of meticulously constructed beauty, each line in its first half answered by one in its second, and every gag and plot point buffed to a sheen. But the real magic is in the way that even when you're trying to look for that stuff on your tenth watch, its energy sweeps you up and stops you picking it apart at around the point Marty invents the skateboard. Majestic.

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Primer (2004)

Conceived, written and shot by maths grad and former engineer Shane Carruth, Primer is far more stringently mathematical than your average time travel lark. It's strikingly original and, being made for just $7,000, has a very obviously homemade aesthetic, which is both a part of its charm and a restatement of its central themes: how might time travel actually be discovered, how would it practically work, and how would we really react to it? You might need a couple of YouTube explainers, but it's as down-to-earth as time travel cinema gets.

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Memento (2000)

Christopher Nolan is, as we've noted, is contemporary cinema's master time manipulator, and still stands as perhaps his most effective experiment with it as a plot motor. Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) gets bonked on the head and can't form any new memories, but he'll stop at nothing to find out who attacked him and killed his wife. Cue a thriller that plays out across two timelines: one, in black and white, plays forwards; the other, in colour, runs backwards. It's a daring and ingenious gambit that works brilliantly, and with Wally Pfister on board as cinematographer, Nolan's work has rarely looked more gorgeous.

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See You Yesterday (2019)

There haven't been very many big time travel films featuring Black characters. As one character in the time travel sitcom Timewasters noted, it tends to be "what white people do, like skiing or brunch". Here, though, teenage genius CJ invents a time travel device (taking advice from her science teacher, a nice little cameo for Michael J Fox) and uses it to try to stop her brother from being killed by police. It's a potent set-up, and if it gets a little confused in the final third, it's still one of the freshest uses of a time-looping storyline.

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Happy Death Day (2017)

Groundhog Day asked what would happen if a time loop meant you could live forever. Happy Death Day asks what would happen if a time loop meant you couldn't help dying. College student Tree wakes up in her flatmate's room on her birthday, and has a pretty normal day until she's unceremoniously chopped up by a masked figure. Then, weirdly, she's back in her flatmate's room, and it's her birthday again. And again. And again. Eh? To escape she's going to need to figure out who her killer is, and sort her life out on the way. This is clever horror, with a time-travelling twist.

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Edge of Tomorrow (2014)

This one's considered a minor work in Tom Cruise's oeuvre, especially landing at just the point that the Mission: Impossible films were starting to get properly incredible again, but it's a lot of fun. Cruise plays against type as a cowardly, combat-averse army PR guy who's thrown into actual battle for the future of Earth. Aliens have taken over most of Europe, but with a bright new alien-smashing hope – Emily Blunt – humanity might have a chance. Cruise doesn't though; he's dead almost immediately. Until he isn't. The day of the battle keeps replaying, and if he can work out why, Earth might just be alright.

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La Jetée (1962)

This French short by Chris Marker packs a lot into its 28 minutes. After a nuclear war, an experiment in time travel sends a prisoner back from ravaged Paris "to call past and future to the rescue of the present". Rather than moving images, most of La Jetée is a carefully edited montage of stills, lending it an eerie, haunted feel. If you're wondering what La Jetée means in French, it's 'the jetty' at the centre of a mysterious image which the prisoner can't get out of his mind – and it also sounds a lot like 'là j'étais', or 'there I was'. It'll make sense when you see the final shot.

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Run Lola Run (1998)

This German-language thriller is extremely 1998 – thumping techno soundtrack, breakneck editing, payphone-centric plot points – but it's an intriguingly constructed triple-stranded race against time which goes big on the metaphysics of the whole thing. Lola's boyfriend Manni rings her in a bit of a flap: he's managed to mislay 100,000 Deutschmarks which he was about to drop off to some underworld type who'll definitely take a dim view, and he needs Lola to help him get the money together in 20 minutes or he's dead. We see Lola's attempts to get him out of jail play out three times as she pegs it round Berlin, setting off chains of events right, left and centre.

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Looper (2008)

Rian Johnson's breakout hit follows Joseph Gordon-Levitt's Joe, the titular looper, who goes around helping crime syndicates get rid of people they don't like by killing them once they've been time-travelled into his timeline. The idea is that the loopers retire after killing their future selves, but the future version of Joe – played by Bruce Willis, with some neat face-blending VFX – goes rogue in an attempt to save his wife from being killed, by himself, in his timeline. It'll take you a while to get over Levitt's eyebrows and digitally Willis'd features, but this is a smart, stylish sci-fi thriller.

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