“It’s Groundhog Day!” 5 Time-Looping Tales You’ll Want to Experience More Than Once

Edge of Tomorrow, directed by Doug Liman
Though the name makes it sound like a Douglas Sirk melodrama from the 1950s (at least until they changed it on the DVD to Live Die Repeat, which is a little on the nose) and the trailer made it look like a mishmash of Tom Cruise’s earlier sci-fi under-performer Oblivion and the power armor from Elysium, Doug Liman’s adaptation of the Japanese novella All You Need is Kill is one of the best sci-fi action films in ages. It’s also a perfect example of a looping narrative: Cruise plays slick military P.R. man who pisses off the wrong general and is sent to the front lines in humanity’s brutal, losing war with a feral alien race. He’s quickly (and graphically) killed on the battlefield by one of the creatures exhibiting strange behavior, only to wake up the day before the battle to do it all over again. Though no one else is aware of the repeating days, Cruise does get some help from an elite commando named Rita (Emily Blunt), who previously fell into a similar temporal loop and has some theories about how to use it to stop the aliens. Of course, like any plan, it involves a lot of trial and error. In this case, the “error” usually involves Cruise getting a bullet to the head.

“Cause and Effect,” Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 5
If you’ve ever seen this classic fifth season episode, you remember it: It’s the one where the Enterprise explodes with the entire crew onboard even before the opening credits roll. We return from commercial to find everyone alive and well, but soon the ship becomes trapped in a strange subspace anomaly and explodes again. And again and again—I haven’t counted, but I’d guess we see the ship bite the big one about 10 times in 45 minutes. It looks hopeless, even when the crew begins to experience deja vu and considers different options to end the cycle as, of course, unaware of what they’ve done before, they keep making the same mistakes. Luckily, Data’s presence gives Picard and Co. a small advantage, as they determine they are able to send a small bit of, er, data back through time just before the ship explodes. Again.

Run Lola Run, directed by Tom Tykwer
With a plot structure ripped from a video game, this late-’90s indie thriller features Franka Potente as Lola, a young woman with candy-colored hair who gets mixed up in a bad bit of business and must use all her wits (and run as fast as she can) to save her small-time crook boyfriend from being killed for fouling up a job. Like Mario with an extra life, each time Lola messes up, she goes back to the beginning to try again. It’s not a pure loop, as things play out a little differently each time even though Lola doesn’t seem to realize what’s happening to her, but it definitely makes for a pulse-pounding film (mostly because I hate running so much and watching Potente high-tailing it across Germany makes me want to lie down and take a nap).