Metacritic reviews

The film, in its early going, also has a nice light humor about it, and an engaging, albeit tragic, love story.

Machine makes its look-to-the-future-not-the-past message as clear as a Grammy acceptance speech, but as an exploration of regret and the elusive quality of time, it falls well short of "Memento," another film starring a sad-eyed Pearce.

Amazingly stilted before accelerating into its exciting finish.

There's something wrong with a time-travel movie that allows an audience's interest to drift so that we have time to worry over where he's parked, and whether he remembered to take his key.

Deliberately quaint and old-fashioned, a once-over-slightly exercise in nostalgic wonder directed by the British-born great-grandson of H.G. Wells, who treats the spirit of his ancestor's novel with literal-minded fealty.

Weirdly disjointed and uncertain as to tone.

This uninviting and pallid version, starring Guy Pearce, is intent on grinding all the sharp edges off the original story, in effect making the movie childproof, so no one can get hurt touching it.

Breaks down when it gets to the distant future, which in this case isn't a good place to be stranded.

A witless recycling of the H.G. Wells story from 1895, with the absurdity intact but the wonderment missing.

Wells' vision of the distant future is cartoonishly simplistic without the subtext of British class consciousness that informed the novel.