The 20 Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made

Related: Best Sci-Fi Movies Streaming on Netflix

Related: All Time Best Sci-Fi Movies

Men in Black, one of the most successful movie franchises in recent memory, returns this month with a third installment (in theaters this Friday). This time around, Will Smith's Agent J must travel back to the 1960s in order to rescue Agent K from an assassin trying to alter the future.

From what we've seen, Josh Brolin's impression of a young Tommy Lee Jones might be the movie's coolest effect, but the whole time travel thing got us thinking about what movies have made best use of the device. Without rewriting any history, here are the Top 20 Time Travel Movies Ever Made.

Every now and then, a film is made seemingly just because the title demanded it. Hot Tub Time Machine, clearly one of those films, actually holds up pretty well amongst time travel movies.

If it wasn't completely obvious, time travel comes into play when the four heroes of the story (John Cusack, Craig Robinson, Rob Corddry, Clark Duke) sit down in a very special hot tub and are transported into the past—from 2010 to 1986, to be precise. When they reach '86, they realize they cannot alter any events, no matter how badly they might want to, or they run the risk of the youngest of them never being born.

The question of whether or not to alter the past once you get there runs throughout all time travel stories, and Hot Tub Time Machine presents a nice twist on the theme. And it's about a hot tub that takes you back in time, so what's not to like?

The argument over what's the best Jean-Claude Van Damme movie is vicious and highly controversial, so we'll steer clear of that for now. All we'll say is that more people paid to see Timecop in the theater than any other JCVD top-liner, which might have something to do with the cool premise and a script from Battlestar Gallactica and Heroes writer Mark Verheiden (based on his original comic).

Van Damme plays a federal agent tasked with preventing criminal abuse of time travel technology. As is the case with many time travel films, there are many dots to connect as our hero jumps back and forth through time, from one reality to the next, but the bottom line here is that the very U.S. Senator charged with stopping time travel abuse is the worst perpetrator—and, on top of all that, he killed JCVD's wife.

As you can imagine, things don't end well for said senator, thanks to Jean-Claude's total comprehension of time travel science (he must have watched a lot of Doctor Who).

Denzel Washington and director Tony Scott know how to make a decent action flick (they're at four collaborations and counting), and while Deja Vusuffers from serious plausibility issues, the two old pros pull it off in style.

Yes, that's right—we said "plausibility issues" in a time travel movie. Give the writers credit for trying to take the technological aspects of it seriously, but introducing time travel as a tool in the hands of the contemporary FBI doesn't really ring as true as the film might want it to (sometimes you just need a magic hot tub).

Nonetheless, the movie spins an interesting web as Washington falls in love with Paula Patton, who plays a dead woman he observes through a window into the past, and then becomes determined to save.

Pleasantville was written and directed by Gary Ross, who also wrote Big, which is not on this list only through a time travel technicality. Technically speaking, Pleasantville isn't really a tale of traveling through time, either, but its 1950s nostalgia and theme of returning to innocence allowed it to qualify.

The film tells the story of two 1990s teenagers transported into a (fictional) 1950s TV show, Pleasantville, where everything is black and white and peachy keen. The two kids, played by Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon (now we're getting nostalgic), are understandably thrown by this turn of events, and start to introduce some of their own flavor into the new surroundings.

As their influence spreads, it starts to color everything, literally, with a wide range of consequences. Pleasantville is a little schmaltzy, but it's also very effective in showing what happens as innocence melts away.

Speaking of schmaltzy, Somewhere in Timeis one of those romances you just have to take for what it is—but what it is can get you some serious play. For anyone who grew up in the '80s, you remember this as every hot girl's favorite movie, and it can still set the mood.

Christopher Reeve plays a playwright who becomes obsessed with an actress (Jane Seymour) from the early 1900s, only to discover that they are lovers across time and space and are destined to be together forever. He journeys back through time to be with her, and struggles with physics, psychology and bad guys to remain with his soul mate. The time travel trick here is hypnosis, but more even than that, it's love (just go with it).

OK, now things are getting trippy. It's bound to happen when discussing time travel, and when you throw in irreverent filmmaker Terry Gilliam, you get some seriously weird stuff. A blend of Monty Python and one very dark fairy tale, Time Bandits tells the story of Kevin (Craig Warnock), an 11-year-old boy, and the six dwarves who drag him into their scheme to travel through holes in the fabric of time and space in order to steal historical treasures. Yup, that's what they do.

Through their travels, they meet Napoleon (Ian Holm), Robin Hood (John Cleese), and Agamemnon (Sean Connery), and then things get even weirder. Kevin and the dwarves wind up battling an Evil Genius for control of the map that shows where the holes in time are located, and in the end, Kevin's parents explode.

Before his Spider-Man films, Sam Raimi earned cult hero status for his trailblazing work in the horror-comedy genre (he still is a cult hero, but now his movies cost a lot more). The Evil Dead series follows an unlucky guy named Ash (Bruce Campbell), who is haunted by demons released from the Necronomicon, a.k.a. the Book of the Dead.

In this third installment in the series, Ash is transported to the year 1300 A.D., where he's roped into a Medieval war. He is told that the only way he can return home is to recover the Necronomicon, but when he bungles that, he unleashes an even bigger war, this time between zombies (called Deadites) and humans. Eventually, Ash, whose weapons include a sawed-off shotgun and a chainsaw hand, is able to save the day and return his job working at a discount store.

Without H.G. Wells' seminal sci-fi story, published in 1895, the hot tub time machine would just have been a hot tub. Wells' hugely influential work has been adapted into a major motion picture twice, but we'll go with the first version here, winner of the 1960 Oscar for visual effects, over the less award-worthy 2002 version.

In this story, which isn't exactly a pick-me-up, a man travels into the distant future to discover that the world is split into two races—the Eloi, who are all about peace and love, and the Morlocks, who are all about eating Eloi. Our hero falls in love with an Eloi girl named Weena, and must battle against all odds to save her from the Morlocks, only to lose her again in the abyss of time.

Superman is a film that could find a place on 100 different lists, but here we're focusing on the final action sequence, in which the Man of Steel flies around the earth fast enough to reverse its spinning, and thereby travel back in time. He does this in order to rescue Lois Lane, who he let die in an earthquake. This may be the 12th greatest time travel moment, but it's the No. 1 greatest "undo" in movie history.

Let's get meta for a moment: This film is based on a book based on H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, with Wells himself as the lead character.

In Time After Time, Wells (Malcolm McDowell) actually invented a time machine in 1893, which is then used by Jack the Ripper (David Warner) to escape the police, sending him to present day (1979) San Francisco. Wells follows Jack in order to stop him from terrorizing another city, and winds up falling in love with a modern woman (Mary Steenburgen). Jack, meanwhile, is doing his ripper thing, and uses Amy, Wells' new love, to bait him—Jack still needs the time machine's master key in order to have total control over the device.

Finally, Wells manages to send Jack hurtling endlessly through time, and then return to Victorian England, with Amy in tow.

Typically with time travel stories, the idea is to see how far the hero can take his ability to defy all physics, zooming hundreds or even thousands of years in either direction from the present day. And then there's Groundhog Day, in which the hero has no control over his time travel, and only ever moves 24 hours in reverse.

Groundhog Day, in which jerkhole weatherman Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is forced to live the same day over and over again, is not only a Bill Murray classic, but really a shining example of writer-director Harold Ramis' brand of high-brow/low-brow comedy. After living dangerously and repeatedly committing suicide, Phil decides to use his time loop to better himself, learning to play piano and ice sculpt, and finding love in the process.

For fanboys in the '90s, 12 Monkeys must have felt like Watch the Throne. You had Terry Gilliam, director of Brazil and Time Bandits directing a script from David Peoples, screenwriter of Blade Runner and Ladyhawke (and Unforgiven). Well, this movie didn't change the entire sci-fi genre, but it did get Brad Pitt his first Oscar nomination, and it remains an entertaining mind-bender.

Bruce Willis plays James Cole, a convict sent back in time from the year 2035 to gather information about the virus that has devastated Earth's human population. Unfortunately for him, he arrives on earth earlier than planned, and is thrown into an insane asylum. From there he starts to unravel the mystery of the epidemic's outbreak, which takes some pretty intense twists and turns throughout time and space, winding up with Cole witnessing his own death.

No one said time travel was all storming castles and flying cars.

Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo wrote, directed, and acted in this twisted time-bending mystery, in which a man discovers that he is a copy of himself (or is the copy a copy?), and that he's been screwing around with a time machine, causing havoc in the universe. Or at least, the neighborhood.

Timecrimes is a very high concept film pulled off with indie energy and style, keeping the action and suspense contained within a single man's mind (or is it more than one man's mind?).

What many history books won't tell you is that the 1980s were the heyday of SoCal dimwittedness—but there were no hard feelings, as all the surfers, stoners, and Encino Men seemed to have a real sense of humor about it.

The '80s classic Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure was built entirely around the fact that two average high schoolers from the L.A. suburb of San Dimas would be complete and total morons, and only with the help of a time traveling phone booth could they get a passing grade on a history report.

On the flipside, those same two doofuses start a rock band that brings about peace, love, and happiness in the future. Therefore, said phone booth is sent to rescue them from said history test (along with George Carlin for a guide), and Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) embark on a journey through time that brings them in contact with Ghengis Khan, BIlly the Kid, and Socrates, among others. Party on.

The most recent entry into the time travel hall of fame, Woody Allen's magical Midnight in Paris tells the story of a writer (Owen Wilson) who visits Paris with his shallow fiancee (Rachel McAdams), and discovers that at the stroke of midnight he can travel to the Roaring Twenties by getting into a mysterious old car.

Once he's done the time warp, Wilson gets to hang out with heroes like F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates), and he even falls in love with a woman of the era (Marion Cotillard)—who, of course, wishes she could live in the 1890s.

In the end, the moral of the story is that we all have to learn to be happy with what we've got. Woody Allen won the Oscar for Best Screenplay on this one, but he wasn't there to accept it, so we're not expecting him to respond to the news that he cracked the top ten here.

Time travel is a device running throughout the Star Trek films, from the trippiness of The Search for Spockto the most recent, J.J. Abrams-directed reboot, which united Zachary Quinto and Leonard Nimoy (young and old Spock) for a moment of geek glory.

But the fourth Star Trek feature, subtitled The Voyage Home (and directed by Nicholas Meyer), has to be the best use of time travel in the entire series, if for no other reason than Kirk and co. bend time solely for the purpose of finding some humpback whales, extinct in the 23rd Century, in order to save the earth from certain destruction by whale-loving aliens.

Not unlike when Superman spun the earth backwards, the Enterprise crew use a Klingon Bird of Prey to slingshot around the sun and thereby reverse time. Why not? This Greenpeace-inspired extravaganza has Kirk fall in love with a marine biologist, Spock use the Vulcan neck pinch on a punk dude with a loud boom box, and Sulu reveal that he was born in San Francisco. And the whales save the earth, so that's good, too.

Forget time travel and science fiction—it's hard to imagine any feature film coming in with a budget lower than what writer/director/actor Shane Carruth managed on Primer. For the price of a used Daiwoo, Carruth created an effective philosophical thriller, using his own background as a mathematician and engineer to tell the story of the invention of time travel in a way that's eerily plausible.

In the film, a crew of entrepreneurs, using a garage as a lab, stumble onto the ability to travel in time while experimenting with physics and engineering. From there, they become bolder and bolder, eventually allowing things to spiral out of control, leaving behind doubles of themselves (not unlike those in Timecrimes), and betraying each other in a variety of ways.

Like any smart filmmaker working on a limited budget, Carruth leaves the flash off screen, focusing on the impact time travel has on the lives of his protagonists.

Up until the most recent prequel, the entire Planet of the Apes franchise has been predicated on time travel; the human space traveller in the story, be he Charlon Heston or Mark Wahlberg, is always meant to have come from the past. However, in this third film in the original series, the idea of spanning through decades is right at the heart of the story from jump.

After their planet is destroyed by a nuclear bomb, three apes escape the wasteland by using the human spacecraft originally piloted to their world to travel back to the year 1973. Once the apes are in '70s L.A., the film gets into some pretty topical stuff, from nukes to animal experimentation to straight up racism, and takes a very bleak view of humanity overall. Ricardo Montalban, playing a circus owner, even lets the highly intelligent apes down. Dark times.

Many would argue that while James Cameron's original The Terminator, which mixed together action, horror, a tiny dose of humor, and a really sad view of the future of mankind, was a total game-changer but, his follow up, Terminator 2: Judgement Day, was perhaps an even better film. For these purposes, we can call it a tie, and just state that as time travel films go, this franchise will always hold a special spot.

In The Terminator, there are no hi-jinks with kids getting stuck in the past, or random encounters with historical figures; the film tells the story of two soldiers, both sent back in time to find the same woman, Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose fate will determine the course of human history. On the one hand, there is the Terminator himself (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a seemingly unstoppable cyborg determined to kill Sarah, and on the other, there is Kyle (Michael Biehn), sent to save her.

It's not really clear how they travel back in time—the only thing that's certain is that you have to be naked to do it. All blue creatures and flying dragons aside, Cameron knows how to make an action movie, and the pacing and intensity of his Terminator films is enough to sometimes make you worry about where society is headed (we're looking at you, Siri).

What red-blooded American doesn't think Back to the Future when they think time travel? Not even just in movies—most of us are now conditioned to think that actual time travel can only take place in a DeLorean powered by plutonium stolen from Libyan terrorists.

The DeLorean is the time machine in this case, and where it takes hero Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is 30 years back in the past, to the year 1955, where he meets his own mother on the day she was supposed to have met his father. Doc Emmett Brown, inventor of the time machine, helps Marty get "back to the future" while forcing him to get mom and dad together so that there is a future to get back to.

Breaking the plot down any further seems pointless—this is a true American classic, complete with brilliant performances from an ensemble that includes Christopher Lloyd and Crispin Glover. One note: If you're looking for the Nike Air Mags, those don't turn up until Back to the Future II.