Time travel movies worth going back, or forward, for

Strap on your seatbelts and zoom back to when newlyweds Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston snapped up the rights to Audrey Niffenegger's surprise bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife, before it was even published. Understandably, they've not taken the lead roles, now played by Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams, as a couple whose relationship comes under some strain on account of a genetic disorder that causes him to disappear suddenly, only to pop up in a different year Photograph: PR

Flashback, too, to a time when Will Ferrell films were successful regardless of quality. With barely half its production budget recouped after two months on release in the US, Land of the Lost, in which a has-been paleontologist stumbles through a space-time vortex and becomes dinosaur bait, is Ferrell's least-successful summer opening ever Photograph: PR

Great Scott! The fixed point of brilliance around which all time-travel movies must gravitate, Robert Zemeckis's Back to the Future (1985) is one film unravaged by the ages, endlessly relivable. It'll eat up as much time as you can offer it - but you'll never regret it Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was a popular source for adaptation, spawning at least two films and a Broadway musical before this song-filled movie version with Bing Crosby in 1949. The crooner got to say such snappy lines as 'Putteth in the brass and taketh out the lead' Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

If only passing your history exams were this easy: Bill (Alex Winter) and Ted (Keanu Reeves) get unexpected help – and a time machine – from an emissary from the future, allowing them to gather up historical figures such as Billy the Kid (Dan Shor) and Socrates (Tony Steedman) to help prepare their presentation in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (1989) Photograph: Kobal

Detective Denzel Washington travels back in time through a wormhole to stop a bomb from killing over 500 people, as well as romance a hot but inconveniently dead nurse, in Tony Scott's Deja Vu (2006). All in a day's work Photograph: PR

That's kind of the plot for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), too; only the damsel in distress here is planet Earth, under attack from a deep-space probe that misunderstands the lack of response from long-extinct humpback whales. So what do the crew of the Enterprise decide to do? Why, travel back in time of course, to the 20th century, when whales still existed, and return to the present with a pair of cetaceans. Mammoth task? Not for the likes of Kirk and Spock Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Cinetext/Allstar

Ever since making ultra cheapo debut Primer in 2004, writer-director Shane Carruth seems to have been stuck in an awful limbo. It's a pity: the winner of the Sundance grand jury prize is an unforgettably weird, compelling and realistic time-travel tale Photograph: PR

In Chris Marker's 1963 La Jetée, a short film made almost entirely of still photographs, a prisoner in post-apocalyptic Paris is dispatched across time to secure the resources that the present lacks. Chosen for his attachment to a childhood memory - the image of a man shot dead on the observation pier at Orly airport - he spirals inevitably back to that moment, which is revealed as the scene of his own death. Sound familiar? Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive

Of course. La Jetée was remade, and its svelte 28-minute running-time more than quadrupled to 129 minutes, as Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995) Photograph: PR

A toy rabbit is sent back in time from a polluted future world to warn present humans about the destruction that they're wreaking on the planet in The Last Mimzy (2007). The 10-year-old boy and his sister who find it become the smallest saviours of the world Photograph: PR

Or maybe that title belongs to these little people from Time Bandits (1981), who 'borrow' Supreme Being Ralph Richardson's map of the universe's time holes to rob and steal across the ages, only to discover much bigger fish to fry when they confront the Evil in the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive