Looper

Looper (2012) is a time travel film that refuses to waste time explaining its own rules. Rian Johnson has a character say it out loud: if we start drawing diagrams we will be here all day. In 2044 time travel does not exist. It is invented thirty years later and immediately outlawed. When the mob wants someone gone they send them into the past, where a hired looper is waiting. Joe does that job. One day the man kneeling in front of him is himself, thirty years older. The subject is not time. The first half moves like a chase, then arrives at a farmhouse and becomes an entirely different film. Some viewers dislike that turn. It is also the reason the film means anything. Joseph Gordon-Levitt wore heavy prosthetics to resemble Bruce Willis, which was argued about at the time and which some found distracting. Good for: science fiction, time travel, and genre films that break their own shape halfway through. Less good for: the violence is hard, and a threat to a child carries the second half. Anyone demanding airtight time logic will be irritated.