About Time

The night after another unsatisfactory New Year's party, Tim's father reveals to him that the men in their family have the ability to travel through time. They can't change history, but they can change what happens and has happened in their own lives. Thus begins the start of a lesson in learning to appreciate life itself as it is, as it comes, and most importantly, the people living alongside us.

Richard Curtis's time-travel romance landed in mixed-to-favorable territory with critics but found a much warmer audience, a gap that has only widened over time — it ranked high in a recent reader poll despite being middling with press. The central divide was less about the love story and more about whether Curtis's willful sloppiness with his own time-travel rules was charming or frustrating; a striking number of critics independently catalogued the plot holes in detail.