The Best Time Travel Movies Ever Made

List of the best movies about time machines and time travel. The idea of travelling through time has always had an innate appeal, and has found its way into nearly every art form known to man, so it's unsurprising that it's one of the largest and richest science-fiction sub-genres in film history. Some of the earliest films about traveling through time were based on a series of popular science-fiction stories dealing with the topic, including adaptations of the classic novels "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" by Mark Twain and "The Time Machine" by H.G. Wells (among others.)

Over the course of film history, time travel has found its way beyond just science-fiction movies and into just about every different kind of genre and storytelling style. Many of the most popular time travel movies of all time, in fact, are comedies, such as "Back to the F*ture," "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," "Army of Darkness" and "Hot Tub Time Machine." Other films have used time travel as a backdrop for romance (as in "Somewhere in Time" or "The Time Traveler's Wife"), mysteries (as in "Time After Time") and, of course, action filmmaking (as in James Cameron's "Terminator" films.)

Despite their differences in tone and presentation, most time travel films explore similar themes, or rely on consistent motifs and common ideas about what it means to travel through time. For example, many films explore the negative consequences associated with "changing the past" while traveling through time, implying that even a small difference in the past could have massive ramifications on how the f*ture develops. (This often goes hand-in-hand with the idea that humans running into their past counterparts could create a paradox that would rip apart the space-time continuum.) Other common themes in time travel stories include a person or group that serves as Time Overlords or controllers who maintain balance, or people who venture back in time hoping to stop bad things in the past from ever occurring. These are some of the best time travel films, but if you don't see your favorite, make sure to add it to this list of the best time travel films so it might soon become someone else's favorite.