1.Groundhog Day (1993)
In the film, Murray plays Phil Connors, an egocentric Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania TV weatherman who, during a hated assignment covering the annual Groundhog Day event (February 2) in Punxsutawney, finds himself repeating the same day over and over and over again. Subsequent to his indulging in all manner of hedonistic pursuits, he begins to reexamine his life and priorities.
2. A Perfect Plan (2012)
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From the director of the breakout hit Heartbreaker and the producers of The Intouchables comes A Perfect Plan, a romantic comedy with a French twist, starring Diane Kruger (Troy) and Dany Boon (Welcome to the Sticks). A Perfect Plan will be released in UK cinemas and on demand on 13 June.
In Isabelle’s family, every first marriage has ended in divorce, but the second is golden.
To circumvent her family’s curse Isabelle (Diane Kruger) devises a plan; marry and divorce a complete stranger before wedding her faultless fiancé Pierre.
After her initial plan backfires she targets Jean-Yves (Dany Boon), an adventurous yet quirky travel writer whom she tries to manipulate with her powers of seduction.
A series of misadventures beset them as they take on Africa and then Moscow in whirlwind succession, breaking Isabelle out of her comfortable routine existence.
Despite her best efforts to make him fall for her, things don’t go to plan and Isabelle experiences the rush of life-on-the edge. Will she discover that love doesn’t always come in the perfect package?
3. Predestination (2014)
Inevitability and destiny are at the root of this mind-twisting adaptation of Robert Heinlein’s short story “All You Zombies,” a complicated, often boggling and frequently challenging sci-fi drama dealing with the self, identity, gender and, of course, the paradox of time travel. Ambitious and occasionally straight up weird, Predestination has currency on its side on every level. The film comes from the fine tradition of other time travel thrillers like Primer, Looper and Source Code, but Predestination takes temporal paradoxes to an entirely new (and nearly unsustainable) level.
For those who haven’t read Heinlein’s semi-obscure story, it’s difficult to explain the plot without revealing too much and thereby removing the pleasure of its onion layer narrative (though seasoned sci-fi buffs and careful observers should figure it out). Still, it’s the kind of movie that will get audiences talking, trying to find the “beginning” of the story and piecing together—or tearing apart—the logic of it. The genre material could make it a niche market hit and the film lends itself well to download distribution. Specialty festivals are assured.
4. Source Code (2011)
Source Code follows the same formula of a character slowly learning the ins and outs of a time loop as in Groundhog Day, but it draws just as heavily from check-point systems in modern video games, where you restart from a given point upon failure, so that you can immediately try again.
In fact, the film has some important references to games.
The name of the Source Code project is Beleaguered Castle, a variation on the solitaire card game. Solitaire is a puzzle for one player to solve, just like the train-bombing is a puzzle for Colter Stevens to solve.
That aspect of the film is something that it shares with the Tom Cruise movie ‘Edge Of Tomorrow’, and since that film came out three years later, I would not be surprised if someone saw Source Code and went “I like this movie, but we could make it better if we added aliens!” To be fair, that is a pretty fun flick.
Source Code is a great film, and if you have not seen it yet, you should.
It has romance, comedy, action, and even a bit of existential dread.
I may have spoiled some big points, but not so much as to ruin the experience.
At the start of this I admitted that this is not exactly a movie about time travel, but I think that I may want to recall that statement.
For what is memory, if not a form of time travel?
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