Film

About Time

Name: About Time
Genre: Drama, Romance, Fantasy
Released: 2013
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Rachel McAdams, Bill Nighy, Tom Hollander, Margot Robbie

About Time is Richard Curtis's rom-com wearing a time-travel plot, but really it's a film about attention — about noticing your own life while you're living it. Domhnall Gleeson's Tim uses his gift to fix romance, then discovers what actually matters. It's soft, unfashionable, shamelessly sentimental, and works on almost everyone anyway. For anyone who's ever wished they'd paid closer attention to an ordinary Tuesday.

TMDb rating

7.9

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Same director, same warm chaotic ensemble instinct, same belief that ordinary people deserve grand romantic gestures — this is where Curtis first perfected the formula About Time later refined.

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Another love story built entirely around a man who can't control when he disappears through time, with the same ache about presence, loss and what you can't get back.

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Ikiru1952

Both films exist to answer the same question — what makes a life worth living once you actually pay attention to it — but Ikiru gets there through a terminal diagnosis instead of a magic power, no fantasy device required.

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But It's a black-and-white 1952 Japanese drama with a slow, patient pace and no romantic payoff — this will test viewers used to warmth and quick catharsis.

Sliding Doors1998

A sliver of British time-fantasy from the same era, splitting one woman's life into two parallel versions to ask how much of happiness is just timing.

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Notting Hill1999

Curtis again, minus the time travel — just two people, London, and the same conviction that ordinary decency is romantic. Hugh Grant at his most winningly hapless.

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Four Weddings and a Funeral1994

The film that basically invented the register About Time lives in — bumbling English romance shot through with sudden, real grief.

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The Family Man2000no page yet

Nicolas Cage gets shown the life he gave up, Christmas-Carol style — same question as About Time about which version of a life is the one worth choosing.

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Beginners2011

A quieter American cousin — a son processing his father's life and death while stumbling through a new relationship, with the same tender, funny-sad tone.

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Life Itself2018no page yet

If you want the emotional dial turned up even further — generations of family, coincidence, and grief tied together with the same faith that ordinary lives are epic.

But It's more shamelessly manipulative and structurally gimmicky, and reviews were split on whether the sentiment earns its tears.

La Jetée1962

The original film about a man revisiting a single fixed moment of his own past to find peace with it — the ancestor of every time-travel-as-memory story, including this one, told in still photographs instead of motion.

A 28-minute French science-fiction film told almost entirely in still photographs, about a man obsessively drawn back to one image from his childhood — hypnotic, strange, and the blueprint for a hundred later time-travel romances.

But It's short, deliberately artificial, and closer to a photo-essay than a movie — audiences wanting narrative comfort will find it cold and unfamiliar.

Russian Doll2019

Same time-loop machinery Tim uses to fix his life, run through a foul-mouthed, dying-repeatedly downtown-New-York lens — comedy about mortality instead of comedy about romance, using repetition to force self-knowledge rather than escape.

Natasha Lyonne dies over and over on her birthday until she figures out what's actually wrong with her life — the same rinse-and-repeat structure as Groundhog Day, but darker, funnier, and stranger.

But The tone is abrasive and profane where About Time is gentle, and the show demands patience through some genuinely bleak stretches before it turns tender.