About Time, review - Telegraph The bearer of the news is Tim's father, played by Bill Nighy, who rattles through the rules before you can notice they make no sense: no jumping beyond the present, no killing Hitler, and so on. What is permitted, and encouraged, is to use the trick to gee up your love-life - so bumbled romantic catastrophes become bumbled romantic triumphs. This being a film from the writer of Love Actually and Notting Hill, the bumbling is non-negotiable. But Gleeson bumbles with the best of them: his character describes himself as "too tall, too skinny and too orange," but he strikes a Goldilocks balance between gawky and handsome. Opposite Gleeson is Rachel McAdams, an actress familiar with the role of time traveller's wife from both that 2009 film and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris. Here she plays Mary, a publisher's assistant, serial wearer of tea dresses and all-round dream woman. McAdams is a joy, matching Gleeson's comic timing beat for beat, and an early sequence in which Tim relives their first night together is as good as anything Curtis has ever done. But Tim and Mary are so perfectly matched from the off that his time-travelling feels like a sideshow: Curtis's story lacks the diamond clarity of Harold Ramis's bulletproof masterpiece Groundhog Day, where Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell's courtship would have been unthinkable without a fluid fourth dimension. This becomes a problem when Tim and Mary settle down and the film still has an hour left to run. "Drama," for which read "padding," arrives in the form of Tim's troubled young sister Kit Kat (Lydia Wilson), whose long-term struggles with men, alcohol, unemployment and everything else are clumsily foreshadowed and glibly tied up. When Curtis then starts to break his own time-travel rules to shoehorn in one more honey-toned walk on the beach, your patience starts to unravel. Its edges already frayed by the hoary old dress-changing montages, the script's strange dependence on jokes about prostitutes and "the Chinese," and for Tim's quoting, in tones of hushed reverence, from Baz Luhrmann's novelty single Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen). But you don't go to Curtis for polished storytelling and intellectual rigour. You go to him for films to nestle in, where you can spend two hours dreaming that you live in a house as elegantly rumpled as the Lake family's Cornish retreat, quilts and all, and spend your evenings skipping through west London in fancy dress, and pass long and lazy summers drinking tea on the beach and playing ping pong in the garage with Bill Nighy. It's great to be challenged and needled and stung by cinema, but watching a film needn't always be a battle; Time is on your side. About Time is released on September 4