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Movies that feel like The Time Machine (1960)

If you loved The Time Machine, the closest films we have are 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954), The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and Spellbound (1945). All three share The Time Machine's dreamlike feel, which is what we rank on before quality. 8 of the 12 picks below are included with a subscription right now on HBO Max, Criterion Channel and Kino Film Collection and others, checked against today's data.

A Victorian Englishman travels to the far future and finds that humanity has divided into two hostile species.

🍅 77% Rotten Tomatoes7.5 IMDb ↗TMDB ↗dir. George Paltenseepicdreamlikecerebralromantictender

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If The Time Machine hit the spot, these will too

20,000 Leagues Under the Sea poster
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
1954 · dir. Richard Fleischer
🍅 91%7.2adventure · science fiction · fantasy

Common ground: steampunk

The difference: Missing the tension of The Time Machine

A ship sent to investigate a wave of mysterious sinkings encounters the advanced submarine, the Nautilus, commanded by Captain Nemo.

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The Thief of Bagdad poster
The Thief of Bagdad
1940 · dir. Ludwig Berger
🍅 100%7.4adventure · fantasy · romance

Both land scale and dream logic at once

The difference: Made in the 1940s, in a different era of the craft

When Prince Ahmad is blinded and cast out of Bagdad by the nefarious Jaffar, he joins forces with the scrappy thief Abu to win back his royal place, as well as the heart of a beautiful princess.

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Spellbound poster
Spellbound
1945 · dir. Alfred Hitchcock
🍅 86%7.5thriller · mystery · romance

The same mix in both: tension, then ideas

The difference: Leans harder into mystery than The Time Machine does

When Dr. Anthony Edwardes arrives at a Vermont mental hospital to replace the outgoing hospital director, Dr. Constance Peterson, a psychoanalyst, discovers Edwardes is actually an impostor. The man confesses that the real Dr. Edwardes is dead and fears he may have killed him, but cannot recall anything. Dr. Peterson, however is convinced his impostor is innocent of the man's murder, and joins him on a quest to unravel his amnesia through psychoanalysis.

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The Man from the Future poster
The Man from the Future
2011 · dir. Cláudio Torres
7comedy · fantasy · science fiction

Both keep coming back to the same thing: time travel

The difference: Sits closer to comedy than The Time Machine does

Zero is a brilliant scientist. However, 20 years ago, he was publicly humiliated when he lost Helena, the love of his life. One day, an accidental experience with one of his inventions causes him to travel back in time to 1991. Having taken the opportunity to change history, Zero returns to own time to find totally changed.

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Nostalgia poster
Nostalgia
1983 · dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
🍅 88%7.9drama · romance

Romantic and tender in the same breath

The difference: 23 years apart, and the 1980s show

Russian poet Andrei Gorchakov journeys through Italy with his interpreter Eugenia to research the life of an 18th-century Russian composer who once lived abroad. Isolated and consumed by an unrelenting longing for his homeland, Andrei becomes drawn to Domenico, a radical mystic obsessed with spiritual redemption. Through austere imagery and extended temporal rhythms, Tarkovsky examines exile, memory, and the profound melancholy of being unable to belong fully to either place or language.

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Zardoz poster
Zardoz
1974 · dir. John Boorman
🍅 49%5.8fantasy · action · thriller

The same two preoccupations: the future, and dystopia

The difference: Critics were much harder on this one

In the far future, a savage trained only to kill finds a way into the community of bored immortals that alone preserves humanity's achievements.

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La Jetée poster
La Jetée
1962 · dir. Chris Marker
🍅 90%8.2drama · romance · science fiction

Both are built on the same subject: time travel

A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.

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Belle de Jour poster
Belle de Jour
1967 · dir. Luis Buñuel
🍅 95%7.6drama · romance

Romance built on dream logic, twice over

Beautiful young housewife Séverine Serizy cannot reconcile her masochistic fantasies with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. When her lovestruck friend Henri mentions a secretive high-class brothel run by Madame Anais, Séverine begins to work there during the day under the name Belle de Jour. But when one of her clients grows possessive, she must try to go back to her normal life.

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Hiroshima Mon Amour poster
Hiroshima Mon Amour
1959 · dir. Alain Resnais
🍅 96%7.8drama · history · romance

Epic thriller in both cases

The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

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Cleopatra poster
Cleopatra
1963 · dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz
🍅 61%7drama · history · romance

Romantic adventure, and it commits to that

Determined to hold on to the throne, Cleopatra seduces the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. When Caesar is murdered, she redirects her attentions to his general, Marc Antony, who vows to take power—but Caesar’s successor has other plans.

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Ruby Red poster
Ruby Red
2013 · dir. Felix Fuchssteiner
6fantasy · drama · romance

Fantasy with a pulse of tenderness, in both cases

On her 16th birthday, Gwendolyn Shepherd finds out that instead of her cousin, she has inherited a rare gene that allows her to travel through time.

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Great Expectations poster
Great Expectations
1946 · dir. David Lean
🍅 100%7.8drama · romance

The same city underneath both: London

In this Dickens adaptation, orphan Pip discovers through lawyer Mr. Jaggers that a mysterious benefactor wishes to ensure that he becomes a gentleman. Reunited with his childhood patron, Miss Havisham, and his first love, the beautiful but emotionally cold Estella, he discovers that the elderly spinster has gone mad from having been left at the altar as a young woman, and has made her charge into a warped, unfeeling heartbreaker.

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The best-reviewed films that share The Time Machine’s defining feeling.