Författare: Nathan Abrams Professor of Film Studies Bangor University

The festive season can have a strange effect on our perception of time. Days blur together, hours stretch or vanish, and a sense of timelessness sets in. So, what better period to enjoy films that help us to reflect on time itself?

From mind-bending narratives to meditative explorations on time’s passage, these films are perfect for losing yourself – and finding new perspectives on time.

1. Citizen Kane (1941)

Orson Welles’ cinematic masterpiece doesn’t just tell the story of publishing tycoon Charles Foster Kane, it fragments it. It begins with Kane’s death and enigmatic final word, “Rosebud”. The film then unfolds in flashbacks narrated by those who knew him as they seek to discover the word’s meaning.

Each perspective adds a layer to his life while challenging the idea of a singular truth. Welles uses time as a puzzle, showing how memory and perception overlap to shape our understanding of the past.

Citizen Kane trailer.

2. Memento (2000)

Christopher Nolan’s breakthrough film has a reverse chronological structure, intercut with black-and-white sequences moving forward in time. The story is told through a series of scenes that move backwards while the protagonist, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), moves forward with no short-term memory.

The film opens with the end so we know what happens but we don’t know why or how we got there. Each scene ends where the previous scene began, creating a sense of disorientation that mirrors Leonard’s condition.

3. The Clock (2010)

Christian Marclay’s 24-hour video installation turns time itself into art. It includes a stunning montage of scenes from film and television that feature clocks, timepieces or people waiting. More than 12,000 clips are meticulously assembled to create an artwork that itself functions as a clock.

The film’s presentation is synchronised with the local time, resulting in the time shown in any scene being the actual time. This makes viewers acutely aware of time’s passage while simultaneously losing themselves in a hypnotic stream of cinematic moments.

Cinematic and actual time run parallel in a 24-hour montage in The Clock.

4. High Noon (1952)

This landmark Western film collapses real time with screen time. Marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) is preparing to retire and leave town with his new wife, Amy (Grace Kelly). But he receives news that Frank Miller, a criminal he sent to prison, has been pardoned and is arriving on the noon train seeking revenge.

Despite pleas from his wife and townspeople to flee, Kane decides to stay and face Miller and his gang. He then finds himself increasingly isolated as the town abandons him. The film unfolds in approximate real time (85 minutes) between 10.40am and noon.

5. The Killing (1956)

Stanley Kubrick’s non-linear “one-last job” heist movie fragments time to brilliant effect. The narrative unfolds in a series of progressive flashbacks and even “flash sideways”, in which the actions and events are repeated from different characters’ points of view.

The studio hated it and asked him to cut it in a conventional fashion. But Kubrick abandoned the re-edit and returned the film to its original structure. As he told film critic Alexander Walker in 1971: “It was the handling of time that may have made this more than just a good crime film.”

The Killing’s official trailer from 1956.

6. Donnie Darko (2001)

This cult favourite merges teenage alienation and mental health with metaphysical time travel. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Donnie is haunted by visions and drawn into a “tangent universe” where time corrupts and loops back on itself. The film’s complex temporal structure involves parallel universes, predestination and sacrifice.

Its ambiguous ending leaves viewers debating whether Donnie’s actions were heroic sacrifice or delusion, making time itself an unreliable narrator.

7. Groundhog Day (1993)

Bill Murray’s cynical weatherman wakes up to the same day – again and again. As he relives February 1’s Groundhog Day in an endless loop, he is able to improve himself. He eventually evolves from selfishness and cynicism to empathy and kindness.

Interestingly, the film doesn’t reflect on why its protagonist relives the same day over and over again, and just accepts it.

Bill Murray’s character wakes up at 6am on the same day, every day.
Landmark Media/Alamy

8. Run Lola Run (1998)

This German-language thriller tells the same story three times, each with a different outcome. It presents alternative scenarios of Lola’s (Franka Potente) attempt to save her boyfriend’s life.

The film explores chaos theory and the butterfly effect through kinetic storytelling, with tiny variations in Lola’s choices rippling into dramatically different futures. The film’s use of different media, including animation and still photography, for different temporal states adds visual sophistication to its exploration of chance and choice.

9. Arrival (2016)

Time is not linear, at least not for the alien visitors in Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi drama. As linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) learns to decode their language, she begins to experience time as they do – all at once.

The “Heptapod” language requires understanding the entire sentence before beginning it. This serves as a metaphor for how we might experience time if we could see it all at the same time.

10. Back to the Future (1985)

Marty McFly races through time.
Ralf Liebhold/Shutterstock

Few films play with the concept of time as joyfully as Robert Zemeckis’s 1980s classic, and no list of this type would be complete without it. Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) adventures between the 1980s and 1950s using a DeLorean car retrofitted as a time machine.

It explores time, space and consequence, as Marty races to ensure his teenage parents fall in love to restore the future. It also spawned two popular sequels.

All of these films remind us that time isn’t just a backdrop. It’s a force that shapes our lives, memories and stories. As you sink into the cosy limbo of the season, let these cinematic journeys through time inspire reflection on your own. Läs mer…

If you watch one Hanukah film this festive season may I suggest you watch the 2003 film, The Hebrew Hammer. I am particularly partial to this film, it featured heavily in my book, The New Jew in Film, for its self-conscious reversal of cinematic stereotypes of Jews.

Starring Adam Goldberg (fresh from Saving Private Ryan), Andy Dick and Judy Greer, The Hebrew Hammer features an orthodox crime-fighting Jewish hero, Mordechai Jefferson Carver, who saves Hanukah from the clutches of Santa Claus’s evil son, who wants to make everyone celebrate Christmas.

The Hebrew Hammer has been voted among the top holiday movies by the New York Times and Vanity Fair. Moment Magazine listed it among its “Top 100 Most Influential Films in the History of Jewish Cinema” alongside such great films as The Graduate, Schindler’s List and Annie Hall.

The Hebrew Hammer bills itself as the first “Jewsploitation” film since it’s self-consciously based on the Blaxploitation subgenre of American film. A portmanteau of the words “black” and “exploitation”, the genre emerged in the 1970s and was characterised by its controversial portrayal of Blackness, graphic violence and frequent female nudity.

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Speaking to the Hebrew Hammer’s director Jonathan Kesselman about how he crafted the film, he mentioned that he rented all the blaxploitation movies he could get his hands on to get a sense of the genre and how it works. So inspired by this movie marathon, he wrote the Hebrew Hammer in a month and there are clear influences to be spotted throughout.

The eponymous Brooklyn-based Haredi crime fighter is not so much a Jewish James Bond as a semitic Shaft (a classic of blaxsploitation from 1971) – “the kike who won’t cop out when Gentiles are all about” as the theme tune tells us. He is a tough Yiddish-speaking action hero modelled on the Black Panthers. As “the baddest Heeb this side of Tel Aviv”, he is also tattooed and muscled – what in Yiddish would be called a shtarker.

Then there is his whole look. Carver is dressed as a cross between the fictional private investigator Shaft and a Haredi Jew. He wears a black trench coat and cowboy boots but with Star of David-shaped spurs and belt buckle, two exaggeratedly large gold chai (Hebrew for 18 or life) neck chains and a tallit (a traditional prayer shawl) as a scarf. He drives a white Cadillac with Star of David ornamentation and two furry dreidels (spinning tops used during the festival of Purim) hanging from his rear-view mirror. His registration plate also reads L’chaim (Hebrew for “to life” or “cheers”).

Undermining stereotypes

Blaxsploitation films have a complicated legacy with some celebrating them as a revolution in representations of black empowerment and by others as pandering to longstanding and harmful racial stereotypes. For those who celebrate these films, however, they are seen as countering and mocking stereotypes rather than reinforcing them. The Hebrew Hammer can be seen as doing very much the same for Jewish stereotypes.

Carver is recruited by the Jewish Justice League (JJL), which is housed in a building modelled on the Pentagon but in a Star of David shape. The JJL is an umbrella organisation for such groups as “The Anti-Denigration League”, “The Worldwide Jewish Media Conspiracy” and “the Coalition of Jewish Athletes” (whose delegate is, in another dig at anti-Jewish stereotypes, predictably absent).

Carver’s mother is overbearing, his girlfriend is a Jewish American Princess – a spoiled and entitled whiny woman – and her father resembles the Israeli general Moshe Dayan. Carver also manifests every Jewish neurosis: he is allergic to dust, has a taste for Manischewitz wine (Black Label) and cannot handle too much pressure or expectation. When his enemies seek to distract him they do so by throwing money on the ground.

The Hebrew Hammer is less of a Jewish James Bond and more of semitic Shaft.
Jonathan Kessleman

Like in blaxsploitation, these are all harmful stereotypes of Jewish people. However, in The Hebrew Hammer it’s not about bolstering them but mocking and therefore undermining them in a self conscious way.

As well as hyperbolic representations of stereotypes, The Hebrew Hammer reverses the antisemitic trope that Jews are physically weak and cowardly. “We’re often depicted as intellectual, but weak and uncool,” Kessleman said. “It’s important to take back these stereotypes and own them.”

“When I made it, I didn’t think I was making a holiday movie,” Kesselman told me but noted that, “it survives because it’s a holiday movie.” Läs mer…