Best Time Travel Movies: From Back to the Future to Tenet

Time travel has been one of cinema's most productive tricks for forty years, inventing dozens of ways to break a straight timeline — from a modified DeLorean to full-blown time inversion. We picked 12 films from the Kinogram catalog that each test a different version of the same idea: what happens when time stops being a line. All films are available in the Kinogram catalog.

The Terminator (1984). A killer cyborg is sent from 2029 back to 1984 — followed by one man whose only job is to stop it from reaching Sarah Connor. The film that turned time travel from soft sci-fi into an action-movie engine.

Back to the Future (1985). Marty McFly's homemade time machine accidentally interferes with his future parents' first meeting, and he has to fix it without erasing himself from existence. The genre's most recognizable film, and arguably the starting point for everything else on this list.

Back to the Future Part II (1989). Marty travels to 2015 to save his own kids, only to return to 1985 and find someone else has already rewritten history. A rare sequel that takes the first film's rules and pushes them all the way.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). The same cyborg returns a decade later — this time to protect, not kill. Standing against him is the liquid-metal T-1000, a threat that can't be shot, only outsmarted.

Groundhog Day (1993). A cynical weatherman gets stuck reliving the same day and can't escape until he learns to be a decent person, not just himself. One of the rare films where a time loop becomes a tool for growing up, not a threat.

The Butterfly Effect (2004). A young man discovers he can return to his own childhood through old diaries — but fixing one problem always creates a new, usually worse one. Probably the darkest take on the "butterfly effect" idea here.

Looper (2012). In the future, a crime syndicate erases inconvenient people by sending them into the past, where hired killers finish the job — until the target turns out to be the killer himself, thirty years older. Sci-fi for people who want cold logic rather than nostalgia from the genre.

About Time (2013). After learning the men in his family can travel through time, the hero uses the power not for big changes but to live ordinary days a little more attentively. The warmest film on this list, and nearly effects-free.

X-Men: Days of Future Past (2014). To stop a catastrophic future for mutants, Wolverine's consciousness is sent back into his own younger body in 1973. A good example of a superhero film using time travel to honestly merge two separate casts into one story.

Edge of Tomorrow (2014). A soldier dies on his first day of combat and wakes up at the start of the same day again. The more times he dies, the closer he gets to figuring out how to stop the alien invasion.

Interstellar (2014). Technically a film about space and wormholes, but it's the time-dilation sequence near a black hole — where one hour for the crew equals years back on Earth — that turns it into a story about traveling forward in time without a machine.

Tenet (2020). An agent learns to work with time inversion, a future technology that sends specific objects and people moving backward while the rest of the world moves forward. The hardest puzzle on this list — a film built to be rewatched.

If you want the most approachable entry points, Back to the Future and Groundhog Day still work without any explanation needed. If you're after more complex mechanics, Looper and Tenet reward close attention. All films — with descriptions, release years, and availability information — are in the Kinogram catalog.