About Time
2013 · Richard Curtis
For a soft night in when you want to fall in love and then call your dad. Pure comfort on the surface, with a good honest cry waiting underneath.
What it's about
After another dismal New Year's party, awkward young Tim learns a family secret from his father: the men in their line can travel back within their own lives and redo their own moments. He uses the gift the way anyone would — to fix botched first impressions and win the woman he loves — but the film slowly turns into something else: a question about which moments deserve a second visit, and which just have to be lived.
The experience
It starts as a breezy, self-deprecating British rom-com and sneaks up on you; by the last act it's less about romance than about fathers, time, and paying attention, and it will absolutely make you cry. Funny, cozy, and casually devastating.
Performances
Bill Nighy, as the father, gives the most quietly devastating performance of his late career — dry, warm, and heartbreaking without ever pushing. Domhnall Gleeson makes gawky sincerity leading-man material, and Rachel McAdams is effortlessly winning.
The craft
Richard Curtis — the writer behind the modern British romantic comedy — made this as his farewell to directing, and it plays like a summing-up: the jokes and the weddings are all there, but the time-travel conceit is used for feeling rather than plot mechanics. The Cornwall seaside scenes give it a golden, lived-in glow.
Why it matters
Filed under 'pleasant' on release, it has been steadily revised upward by a decade of word-of-mouth into a beloved modern comfort classic — the Curtis film people say actually changed how they think about ordinary days.
Reception & legacy: how About Time was received, argued over, and remembered →
Richard Curtis — screenwriter of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, director of Love Actually, and thus an architect of the modern British romantic comedy — announced this would be his last film as director, and it plays like a summing-up. A young man learns from his father that the men of their family can revisit their own pasts; what begins as a gadget for repairing botched first impressions matures into something stranger and sadder, a meditation on which moments deserve a second visit and which must simply be lived. The courtship, with Rachel McAdams, is the advertised attraction, but the film's true love story is between Domhnall Gleeson and Bill Nighy as son and father — Nighy giving the most casually devastating performance of his late career. Critics initially filed it under pleasant; a decade of word-of-mouth has revised the verdict upward. Curtis's craft here is sincerity deployed without apology, walked right to the edge of sentimentality and, on the best days, held just short of it.
Lines of influence
- Groundhog Day (1993) — Domesticates a fantastical time conceit into a moral-growth engine — a day (or moment) replayed to rehearse and perfect an emotional beat — and refuses to explain its rules, exactly the mechanism-agnostic approach About Time adopts.
- It's a Wonderful Life (1946) — Establishes the sentimental-everyman template where a supernatural intervention exists solely to reveal the value of ordinary life, licensing About Time's unabashed sincerity and 'live it again to cherish it' payoff.
- Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) — Uses time travel not to alter history for spectacle but to re-experience and newly treasure mundane past moments — notably a chance to speak again to a lost parent, the beat About Time builds its father climax around.
- Back to the Future (1985) — Supplies the family-timeline mechanics About Time turns tragic: intervening in one's own bloodline and the rule that changing the past reshuffles which children get born, which forces the film's final renunciation.
- Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) — Curtis's own screenwriting DNA — the diffident, verbally-fumbling English romantic hero, ritual-gathering set-pieces, and wit-driven ensemble scenes that About Time reproduces as its baseline register.
- Notting Hill (1999) — Codifies the Curtis/Working Title romcom grammar About Time inherits: everyday-London domestic texture, the scene-stealing comic housemate, and timing built on self-deprecating English understatement.
- Love Actually (2003) — Curtis's directorial method carried straight over — interwoven domestic vignettes, seasonal warmth, needle-drop emotional montage, and Bill Nighy deployed as the roguish scene-stealing elder.
- Frequency (2000) — Turns a time-bending conduit into a device specifically for repairing and prolonging a father-son bond, the emotional core About Time relocates from thriller to romantic comedy.
- The Family Man (2000) — Shares the 'glimpse an alternate life' structure that weighs ambition against domestic contentment and endorses the ordinary — the same thesis About Time reaches by having its hero stop time-travelling.
- The Time Traveler's Wife (2009) — Closest craft cousin: involuntary time-jumping structured entirely around a marriage, and literally shares Rachel McAdams as the linear, grounding wife whose steady love anchors the man who slips through time.
- Midnight in Paris (2011) — Deploys rule-light, whimsical time travel as nostalgic wish-fulfillment rather than sci-fi, and completes McAdams's informal time-travel trio — the same 'mechanism as lens, not subject' handling About Time uses.
- One Day (2011) — Structures a couple's whole life by repeatedly returning to one fixed calendar date across years — a temporal-scaffolding device for measuring a relationship that parallels About Time's diary-of-days form.
- Yesterday (2019) — Curtis's own later screenplay reapplying the identical formula: one high-concept fantastical premise left deliberately unexplained, used purely as a lens on love and the sufficiency of an ordinary happy life.
- Palm Springs (2020) — Extends the Groundhog Day loop into a romantic two-hander, continuing the lineage About Time revived of domesticating time mechanics for intimate relationship comedy rather than genre spectacle.
- The Map of Tiny Perfect Things (2021) — A YA time-loop romance whose explicit thesis — learning to notice and treasure ordinary perfect moments — is About Time's 'live each day as if a second time' lesson passed to a younger register.
- Long Story Short (2021) — Jumps a marriage forward year-by-year through involuntary time-skips to warn against failing to savour the present, literalizing About Time's closing moral about living each day with full attention.