Excellent Adventures: The Time Travel Movie Podcast
Three friends, Ellen, James and Paul, explore the hows and whens of time travel in the movies.
Episodes
Paul gushes over this surprise love letter to Back to the Future. A sweetly funny, silly Canadian romp from director Matthew Johnson, that prompts some thinking about where Hollywood is drawing ideas from these days.
Paul navigates the trio through the surprise cinematic time travel adventure of Millennium, starring Kris Kristofferson & Cheryl Ladd. Do they think it's schlock from start to finish, or find some grudging respect therein? 1989 was a packed year for blockbuster spectacle after all...
The pleasures of time travel, the crime genre and family drama all converge in this very smartly constructed movie from writer-director, Rian Johnson. The film is visually inventive, too, as it takes us into a world in which looping through time propels the story and provides much to think about, and happily untangle, as the story races forward. Like Johnson’s other movies, there’s a real attempt to take a very particul...
Ellen, Paul and James take on Je t’aime, je t’aime, Alain Resnais’s unsettling and deeply original twist on time travel.
A man agrees to take part in an experiment that will send him one year into the past for one minute. It goes wrong. Instead of returning safely, he is pulled through fragments of his own memories, especially moments from a complicated relationship, replayed out of order and slightly differently ...
In this Mini Excellent Adventure, Ellen is joined by special guest Dr Jamie Steele, Programme Leader and Senior Lecturer in Film and Screen Studies at Bath Spa University, to explore two distinctive visions of time, memory, and identity in Belgian cinema: Jaco Van Dormael’s Mr Nobody and Toto the Hero.
Together they discuss how both films approach time travel not throu...
It's time to relax & take in the mountain air with Paul, Ellen & James as they enjoy watching the same 2 minutes repeat over & over for the staff of a winter ryokan and restaurant in Kibune, Kyoto.
A Japanese comedy film directed by Junta Yamaguchi, written by Makoto Ueda, and starring Riko Fujitani.
1993 was the year not of one but two dinosaur movies from Steven Spielberg. The first was Jurassic Park (in a sense maybe the DNA was a time travel device…) and the second movie is a much lesser-known title in Spielberg’s filmography as producer; namely We’re Back! A Dinosaur Story. Adapted from a book by Hudson Talbot, this animated movie (produced by the Amblimation studio that was est...
Paul invites longest-serving chum & model builder extraordinare Matt Peerless to chat about the time machine of Back to the Future: the DMC DeLorean sports car.
They discuss its history as a collectible, the versions across the trilogy & what makes the car the Star!
A somewhat forgotten, lavishly produced science fiction road trip movie, Tomorrowland (2015) owes much to the folklore around Walt Disney and Disneyland. An adventure story about a trek to reach Tomorrowland, the movie has its time travel / time warping element to it as protagonists Frank, Casey and Athena embark on a journey that explores the value of pursuing dreams, the dynamic between humans and technology, past / pre...
In this mini excellent adventure, Ellen and her mum Joy dive into Samurai in Time, a film that blends some of their favourite cinematic flavours: slick swordplay, time-travel twists, and a peek behind the curtain of the film industry. Recorded on the drive home from Chichester Cinema at New Park, after a screening presented by the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme in 2025.
Join Ellen, Paul and James in a wide-ranging discussion that begins with Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name.
What starts as an exploration of the film’s narrative - two strangers connected across time and space - expands into a conversation about memory, identity and the human desire for...
Celebrating a whopping 50 episodes of Excellence. Ellen, James & Paul reflect on highlights of 2 years Podcasting together, lessons learned & what the Future still holds. Tune in & celebrate along with them!
This episode, Paul Hosts & invites Ellen & James to a mini quiz on the cinema of the Summer of 1989. With the picture painted, it’s a race against Time to stop a devil of a scheme to undo creation itself.
Discussing the performances of Richard E G...
Our Christmas special two-parter takes a festive leap through time (and film history) as we each pick our favourite Christmas Carol adaptation. Obviously, the correct choice is The Muppet Christmas Carol - which I selected, of course! Michael Caine delivers a perfectly straight-faced Scrooge performance amid singing frogs and bantering ghosts, but it’s Gonzo (as Charles Dickens) who truly steals the show. Narrating the s...
This week, Ellen is joined by Jen Francis - a freelance TV producer and writer whose work spans original scripts, television development and sharp-eyed film criticism. Jen is also the author of Steve McQueen: In The Scene (2025), a new non-fiction study of the director’s craft.
A visually arresting adaptation of the poem ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ , David Lowery’s film is fascinating. It’s a Christmas movie , for sure, and it includes a time travel thread in the tapestry of its tale. What more could you ask for? Inventive, and imbued with a tangible sense of magic, the film prompts an enthusiastic conversation between James and Ellen for this episode.
James and Paul are MIA, but Ellen is forging ahead solo into the wonderfully absurd world of Hallmark Time Travel Movies. From pocket watches that open wormholes to Victorian men horrified by toasters, she breaks down the rules, the romance, and the time-bending tropes that make this subgenre so irresistibly unhinged.
Buckle up—time travel waits for no one!
Time travel, medieval mayhem, and a crooning Yankee - what more could you want? Ellen, Paul, and James dive into A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1949) and its literary origins in Mark Twain’s groundbreaking novel.
Join them as they explore the surprising legacy of this fantastical fish-out-of-water story - c...
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