The title of "The Time Traveler's Wife" (pictured) doesn’t exactly disguise the premise of its plot. Eric Bana is a Chicago librarian who has a genetic mutation that can send him out of the present. Rachel McAdams is the woman who loves him.

The movie’s based on Audrey Niffenegger’s 2003 novel. Elements of it could just as easily be based on dozens of other movies where time travel figures as a plot device. Of course, there’s a sense in which all movies depend on time travel. What’s a motion picture, after all, but a time machine that works at 24 frames per second?

Here are a dozen examples of the time-travel genre.