For the most part, the story is a high fantasy in which three chiefs of Demonland—Lord Juss, Spitfire, and Brandoch Daha—embark on a heroic quest to rescue the fourth lord from his imprisonment in the mountains of Impland. However, at the end, Queen Sophonisba undertakes a resolution to the final problem that could well involve time travel.

A captured warlock in 1691 Massachusetts is thrown forward 300 years to Los Angeles with warlock-hunter Giles Redferne in hot pursuit. Twentieth century chase ensues with pretty nurse Kassandra aiding the hunter.

Compared to the books, I find the Harry Potter movies drawn-out and boring, but I rewatched this one during the pandemic and found that I enjoyed all three thirteen-year-olds as well as Hagrid, Sirius, Snape, Lupin, and—most of all—the fact that the filmmakers didn’t blithely destroy the single static timeline out of a misplaced sense that time travelers are meant to change the timeline willy-nilly.

In this retelling of Rumpelstiltskin, an older Snow White is the distraught mother in danger of losing her child, and she enlists the help of her seven old friends who (among other things) travel through a magic mirror to modern-day Hamburg. Do they time travel? That depends on whether you consider their homeland to be a secondary world (which implies travel from one world or universe to another) or a part of old Germany (which implies actual time travel!). There is a case to be made for it being old Germany, given that the first movie in the 7 Zwerge series told us that they lived in a “sinister forest, deep in the heart of a country known as . . . Germany.”

A king who fears only the passage of time takes one drastic step after another to try to stop time altogether.