This weeks LOST had the bestest, sweetest, juicyest time-travel story I have ever seen on any screen...

My post here asks the question, what OTHER time-travel storys are really good?
(and please, lets just keep this to TV and feature Screens)

My life.

Some semi-recent timetravel stories that I thought were inventive spins on familiar territory....

Frequency is a fun little flick, featuring time travel by voice only.

Futurama's "Roswell that Ends Well" was a hilarious time-travel episode, with a twist on the "What happens if you kill your grandfather" paradox.

Doctor Who did an episode called "Blink" last year that was extraordinarily creepy. Plus it gave a great description of time: "People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but *actually* from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint - it's more like a big ball of wibbly wobbly... timey wimey... stuff."

Star Trek IV.

Surprisingly few Doctor Who episodes are really stories about time travel per se. Most are stories about other things, and time travel is simply the way the Doctor enters the story. There are some exceptions, yes, and Blink is a very good one. Genesis of the Daleks also comes to mind.

Star Trek in its various incarnations has a number of good ones. My favorites off the top of my head would be City on the Edge of Forever, Yesterday's Enterprise, Cause and Effect, All Good Things, and Trials and Tribble-ations.

Babylon 5 used time travel just once (not counting visions), spread across three different episodes -Babylon Squared, and War Without End parts I & II. Like yesterday's Lost it referred to being "unstuck in time", a nod to Slaughterhouse Five. Babylon 5, Slaughterhouse Five... a coincidence, surely. Anyway, very good episodes.

The entirety of Life on Mars is a really wonderful time travel story. I love the ambiguity it has about what's going on, and whether there's really any time travel at all.

Also I love The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror V "Time and Punishment" segment, in which Homer is sent back to the age of dinosaurs, swats a mosquito, and inadvertently changes the future. Later iterations have him accidentally sitting on the first proto-amphibian, sneezing and (prematurely?) killing all the dinosaurs, and eventually losing it and immediately clubbing every creature he encounters. Great stuff.

Movies: The whole Back to the Future trilogy is a lot of fun. 12 Monkeys, Groundhog Day, and Donnie Darko are also stand--outs. Like Life on Mars, Donnie Darko has that wonderful ambiguity where many things suggest that this could be all in the main character's imagination. (Though ultimately I'm pretty sure it's not, in either case.)

Offhand I think my favorites among these as stories about time travel are Cause and Effect, and the Simpsons episode. The other episodes and movies are great for other reasons, but those two really address central issues of time travel, for me.

In general I prefer stories where time travel creates a branch in the timeline. I never really buy the idea that there's only ever one timeline, and it somehow resolves itself to be self-consistent. There are just too many paradoxes possible in that setup, and no good way to prevent them in my opinion. In any story where they don't explicitly say otherwise, I figure there are multiple branches involved, and this usually allows me to explain any paradoxes. So I tend not to be bothered by the apparent paradoxes that may bother others, unless someone is insisting that there's just one timeline.

Time After Time with Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen - a rift on The Time Machine, McDowell plays H.G. Wells. I likes it at the time, but suspect it hasn't aged well.

Blink was incredibly good and very, very, very, creepy.

Back to The Future episode 3 - westerns are always good for fun anachronisms.

Star Trek always does good time travel. Enterprise put Archer in TOS timeline and DS-9 did the same with Sisko and crew.

I was tempted to include Time After Time too, but I was a teen when I saw it, and don't really trust my memory at this point. That would probably be worth a rewatch from Netflix at some point.

The new Futurama DVD, Bender's Big Score is another inventive time travel tale. Great Stuff, except for the two unnecessary musical numbers...

What movie did Chris Reeve star in that was time-travel-ish... anybody?

Time after Time with Jane Seymour - Reeve is pretty good in that one...

That was Somewhere in Time with Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour. Time After Time is Malcolm McDowell, Mary Steenburgen, and David Warner - H.G. Wells and Jack the Ripper. The latter is the one I was talking about. I don't remember much about Somewhere in Time.

It wasn't too terribly bad. Always nice and a little sad to see a healthy Christopher Reeve.

Timequest (2000)

is a VERY heavy time travel film: A story about a man who travels back in time to Fort Worth, Texas on Novemeber 22, 1963 and prevents the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

it actually made my head hurt... took 2 viewings to take it all in.

Can't believe no one mentioned Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. It's silly on a stick.

Time Bandits.

God, yes! Best ever!

Eh.

Groundhog Day and Run Lola Run

The Time Machine: from 1960, starring Rod Taylor, directed by George Pal. The more recent remake with Guy Pearce was nowhere near as good.

Timecop

If only for that scene with Mia Sara.

Best time travel movies that people don't generally consider to be time travel movies:

Pleasantville
Groundhog Day
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Austin Powers in the Spy Who Shagged Me

++++

Time After Time only seems really dated whenever Mary Steenburgen is talking. Other than that, it's still a trip to see David Warner and Malcolm McDowell square off.

When I was a kid, I thought Flight of the Navigator was just about the coolest time travel movie I had ever seen.

Oh, and if you haven't seen a little indie film about time travel called "Primer", check it out. Especially if you dug some of the sciency stuff in the latest episode of Lost.