Time and time again

DONALD CLARKEfires up the DeLorean for a rundown of the best time-travel films - of all time "Society so often breaks down into entirely discrete groups. In 1989, you either liked Bill and Ted or you were a big, dull square"

PREPARE YOURSELF for Hot Tub Time Machine. The upcoming film stars John Cusack as one of several disappointed dudes who encounter a Jacuzzi that somehow transports them back to - it seems like yesterday - the Top Gun-scented, Madonna-coloured Narnia that was 1986. Excited by the film's novel premise, we wondered about the role that hot tubs have played in world cinema. There are several hot tubs in Boogie Nights. Aren't there? There's certainly a prominent hot tub sequence in About Schmidt. Erm . . .

Let's consider, instead, the 10 best time-travel movies. It's an odd bunch, comprising art films, teen comedies and sombre science fiction.

And, as ever with such lists, slippery questions concerning definition are unavoidable. So, for the record, we don't count the imperishable Groundhog Dayas a proper time-travel film. The Terminatorfilms are tricky in a different way: they certainly involve flitting across the decades, but they are not really about temporal high jinks. Yet we include Planet of the Apes? Sorry.

THE TIME MACHINE (1960)

George Pál's romp is, perhaps surprisingly, one of only two adaptations of HG Wells's classic science fiction novel. (The second, from 2002, may have been directed by the novelist's grandson, but it was still atrocious.) The superior version, starring an earnest Rod Taylor, does a decent job of illustrating the conflict - many millennia in the future - between the leisured Eloi and the crude Morlocks, but resists some of the story's grimmer conclusions.

LA JETÉE (1962)

Yes, at just 28 minutes, Chris Marker's strange film doesn't count as a feature. True, composed as it is of still images, it may not even be a proper "motion picture". But the film has proved so influential and resonant that it surely deserves inclusion. In a Paris of the future, certain survivors of a nuclear war investigate the possibilities of time travel. One particular pioneer is haunted by the memory of a woman experiencing a violent conflagration at an airport gate. The temporal tourism eventually explains the image's significance. Sound familiar? Terry Gilliam borrowed the plot for 12 Monkeys.

JE T'AIME, JE T'AIME (1968)

You wouldn't expect Alain Resnais to deliver a time travel film in the style of Bill and Ted. You'd be quite correct to take that view. Claude Rich appears as a writer who, following a failed love affair, has just attempted suicide. When a team of scientists approaches him with the notion of testing a time machine, he glibly agrees to participate and finds himself being randomly propelled between significant moments in his past. As you might expect from the director of Last Year at Marienbad, Je T'Aime, Je T'Aimeis layered with existential insight. Happily, it also features a time machine - squashy and freaky - that would have seemed right at home in Pertwee-era Dr Who.

PLANET OF THE APES (1968)

A tricky one this. There's no question that Franklin J Schaffner's movie is a time-travel film. The hero does not, however, learn this information until the last few minutes of the action. To that point, Chuck Heston thinks this ape-dominated planet could be somewhere on an outer corner of Betelgeuse. At any rate, Planet of the Apesremains one of the most convincing far-future histories that cinema has yet produced. Tim Burton's dreary remake only confirmed the charm of the original.

TIME AFTER TIME (1979)

If you were to travel back in time to 1979, you would discover that the only subject of conversation was Nicholas Meyer's enjoyably barmy Time after Time. Not really. Though the film boasts a horde of obsessed fans, it has never really secured mainstream visibility. Yet there's so much to like. Malcolm McDowell stars as a version of HG Wells who, in actual possession of a time machine, follows Jack the Ripper to (then) contemporary San Francisco. The best of many good jokes finds Wells hurriedly adopting the pseudonym Sherlock Holmes. After all, he muses, who's going to remember some Victorian pulp detective in 1979.

TIME BANDITS (1981)

You could argue that Terry Gilliam's two most satisfactory - the most coherent, the least unruly - films involve time travel. One is the extraordinary 12 Monkeys(mentioned already, so we won't bother with a separate entry). The other is this endlessly delightful family adventure from the early 1980s. As Spielberg was beginning to show, and Pixar would later confirm, the best children's films appeal as much to adults as to their offspring. Even now, Time Bandits's debunking of historical figures remains an absolute hoot. "Have you met the poor?" John Cleese's appallingly patronising Robin Hood barks. "Charming people, the poor. Of course, they haven't got two pennies to rub together, but that's because they're poor."

BACK TO THE FUTURE (1985)

When it emerged in the middle of the High Reagan era, Back to the Futureseemed like a hugely entertaining, but somewhat featherweight piece of work. There is no question, however, that it has set in as one of the key pop-cultural repositories of its era. That is to say, though much of the picture is set in the 1950s , the attitudes, references and tone all reek of 1985. Two sequels followed. Part two made was a roaring mess. Part three was even more cavalier with its timelines, but proved every bit as diverting as the first.

STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME (1986)

Virtually every Star Trekfilm featured a bit of time travel, so The Voyage Homewill just have to stand in for the entire oeuvre. Threatened with disaster by intergalactic humpback whales, Kirk and co return to (yet again) contemporary San Francisco. The film could form a perfect double bill with Time after Time: visitors from past and future comment on California's coolest city within a few years of one another. The best gag? When Spock acknowledges Jacqueline Susan and Harold Robbins as the era's literary "giants".

BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE (1989)

Society so often breaks down into easily distinguishable, entirely discrete groups. In 1989, you either liked Bill and Tedor you were a big, dull square. Following two high-school idiots as they travelled through time to research a history paper, the film had great fun with historical characters, and was notable for its celebration of a developing west-coast youth argot. Admittedly, this often involved little more than saying the word "excellent" a great deal.

PRIMER (2004)

Almost every time-travel film, hindered by the tyranny of causality, finds itself abandoning logic within 20 minutes. Not Primer. Shane Carruth's astonishing no-budget conundrum is taken up with making sense of the paradoxes that temporal meandering throws up. As a result, it takes five or six viewings before it begins to reveal its mysteries. If it is possible to make a realistic time-travel flick, then Carruth (missing in action ever since) has surely managed it.

Hot Tub Time Machineopens next week