A Glean movie guide
Watertight Timelines
Paradox-free viewing.
Time travel movies that follow their own rules without breaking the logic.
Handpicked for this guide
The movie list
- 01
Primer
A hyper-realistic thriller that treats time travel like a dangerous, high-stakes engineering project.
A group of fledgling inventors discover a complex method to manipulate reality. At first, they successfully game the stock market with it, but the consequences of the invention start to catch up with them.
- 02
Timecrimes
A perfectly constructed causal loop where every action is inevitable and logically sound.
A man accidentally gets into a time machine and travels back in time nearly an hour. Finding himself will be the first of a series of disasters of unforeseeable consequences.
- 03
Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes
A clever, real-time experiment that pushes the logic of a two-minute future delay to its absolute limit.
A cafe owner discovers that the TV in his cafe suddenly shows images from the future, but only two minutes into the future.
- 04
Predestination
A masterclass in the bootstrap paradox where every narrative thread is tightly wound and perfectly resolved.
Predestination chronicles the life of a Temporal Agent sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to prevent future killers from committing their crimes. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must stop the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time and prevent a devastating attack in which thousands of lives will be lost.
- 05
12 Monkeys
A gritty, atmospheric thriller operating on the principle that the past is fixed and entirely unchangeable.
In the year 2035, convict James Cole reluctantly volunteers to be sent back in time to discover the origin of a deadly virus that wiped out nearly all of the earth's population and forced the survivors into underground communities. But when Cole is mistakenly sent to 1990 instead of 1996, he's arrested and locked up in a mental hospital. There he meets psychiatrist Dr. Kathryn Railly and the son of a famous virus expert who may hold the key to the Army of the 12 Monkeys; thought to be responsible for unleashing the killer disease.
- 06
Tenet
A massive action spectacle built on the rigorous, mathematical logic of entropy inversion.
Armed with only one word - Tenet - and fighting for the survival of the entire world, the Protagonist journeys through a twilight world of international espionage on a mission that will unfold in something beyond real time.
- 07
Arrival
A profound look at non-linear time that avoids physical paradoxes through the lens of linguistic theory.
Taking place after alien crafts land around the world, an expert linguist is recruited by the military to determine whether they come in peace or are a threat.
- 08
Triangle
A recursive psychological nightmare that maintains strict internal consistency across its looping narrative.
When Jess sets sail on a yacht with a group of friends, she cannot shake the feeling that there is something wrong.
- 09
Coherence
A tense dinner party thriller that uses quantum decoherence to track complex, branching realities.
Four couples gather for dinner the night a mysterious and powerful comet passes overhead.
- 10
The Infinite Man
A meticulously scripted comedy where multiple versions of one man must follow a set, logical path.
A man's attempts to construct the ultimate romantic weekend backfire when his quest for perfection traps his lover in an infinite loop.
- 11
Edge of Tomorrow
A high-octane blockbuster that respects its own biological 'reset' rules until the final frame.
Major Bill Cage is an officer who has never seen a day of combat when he is unceremoniously demoted and dropped into combat. Cage is killed within minutes, managing to take an alpha alien down with him. He awakens back at the beginning of the same day and is forced to fight and die again... and again - as physical contact with the alien has thrown him into a time loop.
- 12
Interstellar
A visually stunning epic grounded in the real-world physics of time dilation and general relativity.
The adventures of a group of explorers who make use of a newly discovered wormhole to surpass the limitations on human space travel and conquer the vast distances involved in an interstellar voyage.