The time travel in Portrait of Jennie is of a spiritual variety, an inexplicable colliding of past and present in the name of a transcendent love that would otherwise never be. In Time after Time, traveling through time is accomplished by the nuts and bolts of science, specifically a helicopter-like machine that converts sun rays into electricity. This is time travel as H. G. Wells envisioned it in his novel The Time Machine (1895), and that’s no coincidence: Time after Time is an ingenious, grown-up fantasy thriller that puts Wells himself inside the machine of his imagination and sends him hurtling into the future. That’s a fresh, clever concept of make-believe, but the film’s creators go a step further by adding another historical figure to their magical revisionism: Jack the Ripper. Written and directed by Nicholas Meyer (with a story by Karl Alexander and Steve Hayes), Time after Time is smart and inventive, an accomplished amalgam of social satire, serial-killer horrors, offbeat romance, fish-out-of-water comedy, and historical conjecture. These ambitious elements congeal so sensibly, and plausibly, that Time after Time whizzes by, a witty entertainment made of equal parts charm, scares, and laughs. And it does all this with a minimum of special effects.

excerpted from John DiLeo’s
Screen Savers: 40 Remarkable Movies Awaiting Rediscovery
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