It Happened Yesterday Again: The 20 Best Time Loop Movies – Ranked! | film

20. Day of the Stork (2004)

An Italian-Spanish remake of Groundhog Day, with a sarcastic presenter doomed to repeat the same 24 hours while reporting on a stork colony in the Canary Islands. Best of all is the Italian title: È già ieri (It Was Already Yesterday).

19. The Incredible Shrink (2019)

It’s Groundhog Day. once again. But the repetitive days now lose an hour with each revolution, leading to a decisive flash of urgency. A Spanish vacation turns agonizingly long for Alba (Iria del Río), who is using the loop she finds herself stuck in to make the most of her life, starting by getting rid of the boyfriend she almost dumped. Ha.

After being inserted into the mind of a man who died in a train bomb, Jake Gyllenhaal must repeatedly relive the eight minutes leading up to the explosion until he discovers the identity of the bomber. A few nice jokes (Scott Pakula, star of the time-travel series Quantum Leap, has a voice cameo; a ringtone plays Chesney Hawkes’ “The One and Only”) can’t hide the fact that suspense tends to suffer when the world can be endlessly replayed.

One of the drawbacks of the time loop film as a thriller rather than a comedy is that the exposition can easily overshadow the characterization. Such is the case in director Rian Johnson’s futuristic fantasy film starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis in the recurring roles of the same “iteration” – that is, a hitman paid to kill and dispose of enemies sent back in time by a criminal gang. Overly expository narration gets in the way, but it’s fun to hear mob boss Jeff Daniels critique the hero’s outdated wardrobe. “Movies that wear your clothes are just copies of other movies,” he told him. “Do something new.” Does he talk to the filmmakers?

16. Before I Fall (2017)

A high school student joins in and cruelly insults the misfit class at a Valentine’s Day party. Once she resets her life after a car accident, she endures endless replicas of that day – including a class on Sisyphus (who has also been referenced in other time loop films including Triangle and The Map of Tiny Perfect Things). There are the usual frustrations typical of the time-loop format – “Suspended? I’m already grounded!” She becomes angry when faced with parental punishment – before she learns not to be such a vile bully after all. amazing.

Happy-go-lucky teenager Kyle Allen is already stuck on the same day when a young woman (Katherine Newton) crosses his path for the first time. It turns out that she shares his predicament, but has poignant reasons for never wanting it to end. Together they embark on a project to paint all the overlooked moments of beauty in their small town. Drawing on references to Groundhog Day, Edge of Tomorrow, Doctor Who, and Time Bandits (which is also centered around a map), this YA-inspired comedy-drama is highly engaging, but it never defines itself.

14. Urusei Yatsuura 2: Beautiful Dreamer (1984)

The time loop only makes up a small initial portion of this anime sequel, which departs innovatively from the original manga on which it’s based. However, it earns a place here for wild, imaginative delirium. A group of school friends, after thinking that their days are repeating themselves, launch into space and discover that their city is carried on the shell of a huge turtle. standard.

In a neat touch, Universal’s opening logo glitches and restarts. We then follow a college girl (Jessica Rothe) who relives her birthday over and over again, which each time ends with her getting killed; Methods include stabbing, bludgeoning, drowning, and death by broken bong. Now it’s up to her to catch her killer. In other words, slaughter a groundhog; This comedy is mentioned when Tree’s new lover, Bill Murray, expresses dismay that she has not seen him. The 2019 sequel (Happy Death Day 2U) was a very distant repeat.

12. Monday: See you this week! (2022)

sensation! An unlucky pigeon crashes into the window of an advertising agency in a Tokyo high-rise – but when it continues, the employees realize they’re stuck in a time loop. Exempt from this knowledge is their boss, whom they must convince (his PowerPoint presentation is a highlight) before the cycle is broken. Director Ryō Takebayashi’s workplace comedy sneaks some cynicism into corporate culture into its maddening form, and hinges on a poetic touch: the secret to escaping the loop turns out to lie in a beautiful, unfinished manga.

Like The Map of Perfect Little Things, this adopts Groundhog Day writer Danny Rubin’s original rejected idea of ​​starting the story with the time loop already in progress. Andy Samberg is the quiet wedding guest haunted by crossbow-wielding J.K. Simmons, who now feels eternal pain after being dragged into the ring with him. Amid this gory comic violence, there’s a serious point: “What we do to others matters… We have to deal with the things we do.” The decline during the first coronavirus lockdown made the film more relatable.

“The human race was doomed. Space was off limits. The only hope was time.” Chris Marker’s half-hour short film consists of a series of still images and one briefly moving image, in which a neutral narrator explains how a post-apocalyptic time traveler is haunted by a childhood memory when he sees a man die at Orly Airport. Spoiler alert: It was his death that he witnessed all along. It was reprized by Terry Gilliam as the 12 Monkeys.

Groundhog Battle: The Time Loop arrives on the battlefield, where backroom boy Tom Cruise is forced to become cannon fodder in a war against marauding alien monsters. He soon dies, only to wake up again in the first of an endless series of episodes, each time armed with a little more knowledge about the enemy. It descends into a crushing, monolithic battle over the last half hour. Until then, it’s going to be a lot of fun, with Cruise happy to be eliminated time and time again and playing second fiddle to Action-hero Stakes star Emily Blunt.

8. 12:01 PM (1990)

Adapted from a short story by Richard LeBeouf, this Oscar-nominated short begins with a businessman (Kurtwood Smith) already taking his lunch break for the umpteenth time before the clock resets again. Over several endless lunch times, he gained access to a scientist who made predictions about time loops. The overriding note, however, is one of absurdity: the short ending ends, boldly and bleakly, with the stranded hero trapped forever. It was later expanded into the sleazy 1993 TV movie 12:01.

A revolutionary leader fighting a futuristic war against a malevolent artificial intelligence and his robot minions sends his father back in time to save his mother from a merciless killing machine, so she can in turn become pregnant and give birth to him. This child will then grow up to become a revolutionary leader who fights a futuristic war against the malicious artificial intelligence and its robot minions, and can return his father to… Wow.

Jacques Rivette’s free Parisian fantasy is madness in both senses. A pair of curious friends – one a magician (Juliet Berto), the other a librarian (Dominique Labourier) – run amok in Montmartre. They return again and again to the mansion where a sinister Jamesian melodrama about the murder of a child is re-enacted in an episode. By sucking on the magic candy, the friends can first observe and then participate in the plot, taking on the role of the baby’s nurse and intervening to avert disaster: “We must save the baby at all costs!”

Bullied single mother Melissa George takes a yacht trip with friends, only to be hit by a freak storm, forcing them all to board a passing cruise ship where a serial killer appears to be the only passenger. This is the good news. The bad? Events stumble into an endlessly repetitive pattern, turning this film into the world’s first sea loop film. Unforgettable images depict detritus from the episode’s previous eruptions: piles of discarded identical lockets, handwritten warnings from the past akin to souvenirs, and multiples of the same corpse pecked by indifferent seagulls.

4. G-Time, G-Time (1968)

A freight forwarder who survived a suicide attempt agrees to take a trip back in time: scientists will send him exactly one year into the past, thanks to a time machine that looks like a giant pumpkin, and then send him back just a minute later. However, the recovery mission does not go according to plan, and the grieving soul jumps between fragments – some repeated, and not in chronological order – of the failed relationship that drove him to despair. Director Alain Resnais had already dabbled in tentative trickery with last year’s At Marienbad, but this work is more accessible and more tender, as well as a definite influence on Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep.

3. Groundhog Day for a Black Man (2016)

Director Cynthia Kao delivers four minutes of darkly comedic social commentary in a Groundhog Day format. Like Bill Murray in that film, the protagonist here (played by Burl Moseley) is woken up every morning by Sonny & Cher’s I Got You Babe. But, being black, he finds every day cut short in the same way: no matter how placated and non-threatening he is, he ends up being shot by a white policeman. The horror is expertly leavened with supporting gags (a lobster costume, lemon meringue pie) and the payoff is suitably realistic. The similarly intriguing 2020 Netflix short Two Distant Strangers won an Oscar and attracted accusations of plagiarism.

A video installation on the theme of time, Christian Marclay’s masterpiece The Clock is a collage of film clips extending over 24 hours in a literal loop, with neither beginning nor end. The clock is tied to whatever time zone it is displayed, and also functions as an actual clock: when the city hall clock appears on screen in Back to the Future at 10:04 PM, that is the time in real life; And when Heather Langenkamp in A Nightmare on Elm Street sings “Nine, ten, never sleep again,” there’s no need to check your watch: It’s already 9:10 p.m. The integrity has been weakened by snippets of TV clips (including ER and Ricky Gervais’ sitcom extras) but for the most part this is a work of hypnotic genius. Make sure you’re there at 6 a.m. for a huge mix of parts from Groundhog Day and What About Bob? Good morning Vietnam and scary night.

“That’s right, woodsman, it’s… Groundhog Day!” Wander through the history of the time-loop movie and you’ll always end up coming back to Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin’s miraculous fusion of formal experimentation and mainstream ideas. Bill Murray is at his obnoxious best as a misanthropic weatherman who can’t wait for his trip to the Groundhog Day festivities in Pennsylvania’s popular Punxsutawney festivities to end. It may end on February 2, but February 2 isn’t precisely how long he’s been on that day. “To me, it had to be… a hundred years,” Rubin said. But the complete absence of explanations in the script is one of its most radical qualities – a tribute to the filmmakers for resisting pressures to blame the time loop for the curse of a rejected lover or a black hole.

Loved by everyone from David O. Russell and Monty Python polymath Terry Jones to Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wareing, Bridget Jones director Sharon Maguire, and even Mad Max creator George Miller, Groundhog Day has spawned a musical, a virtual reality game, an Italian remake, and countless imitators. (The best is Natasha Lyonne’s brilliant Russian Doll series.) Despite all of this, it has never been seen before – or, thank God, there has never been a sequel to it.