I saw the Spanish original at a festival this year and found it quite enjoyable - a comic thriller. According to LA Times it's getting a theatrical release Dec. 5. If it plays by you, it's not going to knock your socks off, but it's fun.

Cronenberg is doing a remake that at this point is dated 2009, but IMDB only lists it as in development.

Note: not long after I posted this, Cronenberg's name disappeared from the IMDB page for a remake.

I saw this at the St. Louis Film Festival and found it a very enjoyable and clever film. The film has the feel of a mathematical exercise in recursion, and there is a darkly comic feel as it shows the increasingly convoluted lengths an ordinary guy would have to go to if he actually did travel backward in time and started messing with the timeline.

I liked the simple approach: no real special effects, just good writing and believable characters. The thought of a remake scares me a little bit, but I would trust Cronenberg more than anyone else to pull it off.

I don't often get into movies like Timecrimes. Reminded me of that low-budget film made by Christians a couple of years ago, where they discover a "worm," or whatever, that allows them to travel into the future a couple of hours. Or maybe they traveled back in time a couple hours. Something like that. One word title for this film. It'll come to me later.

My mind just doesn't wrap around these ideas, even when they're presented in more mainstream films, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At best, I can admire these films, but rarely feel fully engaged by them. More often than not, I just feel lost.

Timecrimes is kind of cool. I'm not sure, again, that it amounted to a whole lot in the end -- not for me, anyway. But it was clever, and it kept me engaged. I look forward to discussions of movies like this, because I learn a lot as I read the thoughts of others.

For those interested in learning more about the film, here's the trailer.

Looking back at my notes, I said it sorta had a Hitchcockian feel -- if Hitch had done sci-fi. That may be a bit of exaggeration.

You wouldn't mean Primer, would you?

(I really like that movie.)

Yes, that's the one. No offense; a lot of people -- including many Christians -- liked it.

An interview with the director at Wired. It isn't very revealing.