Sightlines · reception

How About Time was received

2013 · Richard Curtis · About Time on Sightlines

The arc

Critics in 2013 shrugged at it as a soggy, rule-breaking rom-com — the reviews were notably mixed for a Richard Curtis film — but a decade of word-of-mouth has flipped it into a certified comfort-classic and one of the internet's most reliable 'guaranteed cry' movies.

What’s debated

Fans endlessly relitigate whether the time-travel logic is a mess that matters or a mess that's beside the point — and whether Tim's do-over courtship of Mary is romantic or quietly creepy.

Its footprint

Its live-each-day-twice philosophy is quoted all over the internet as life advice, and Bill Nighy's dad has become shorthand for the movie-father people wish they had; the film is also famously enormous in South Korea, where it's a perennial rewatch favorite.

Where it stands

On Letterboxd it lives in the comfort-movie canon — the rom-com people admit is really a father-son film, filed under 'cried again, no regrets'.

Did you know? About Time made Rachel McAdams the screen's unofficial patron saint of time-travellers' girlfriends — it was her third film loving a man unstuck in time, after The Time Traveler's Wife and Midnight in Paris, without ever time-travelling herself.