CONCEPTS LIKE THE multiverse, alternatetimeline doppelgängers and fracturing reality while trying to rewrite the past have become more familiar since that scene in Back To The Future: Part II where Doc gets out a blackboard and chalk and gives a five-minute lecture (with diagrams) on how time-travel screws you up. 1989 audiences still complained they hadn’t a clue what was going on. That Oscar-winners like Everything Everywhere All At Once and comicbook franchise features like Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse (and, er, The Flash) can play free and easy with multiple realities indicates general viewers have become more open to the kinds of time-tinkering which makes your head hurt.
This selection of currently-streaming time-twisters is almost random — these things come along every month in genres from romcom to slasher movie. I’ve picked items primarily concerned with timewarping, rather than those which fire up the flux capacitor just to get back to some genre which was hot in the ’80s when the exec who greenlit the film was impressionable. Rusty Cundieff’s 57 Seconds, which he co-wrote with Macon Blair from a vintage story (‘Lucifer!’ by E.C. Tubb), has techie-in-trouble Josh Hutcherson use a gadget invented by mystery tycoon Morgan Freeman which can transport him back 57 seconds in time. The brief do-over window is handy (if fringe unethical) in gambling and dating, but becomes dangerously addictive when used ostensibly for the greater good — to expose a Big Pharma villain.
Top: Morgan Freeman in time-travel head-hurter 57 Seconds.
Alamy, Angel Studios