YMMV / Somewhere in Time

• Award Snub:
  • Despite its tremendous acclaim, John Barry's score was not even nominated for an Oscar. It did get a Golden Globe nod, however.
  • It got a single Oscar nomination, for Best Costume Design, but lost to Tess.
• Awesome Music: John Barry's score is simply wonderful and has been popular at weddings for decades. Universal put out a limited run of promotional soundtrack albums but soon had to produce hundreds of thousands of copies because demand was so high.
• Cult Classic: To the extent that it has its own fan club that gathers annually on Mackinac Island, a gathering that eventually attracted visits from both Christopher Reeve and Jane Seymour (Actress).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While it flopped in America, it was a huge hit in China and Hong Kong, where the film continued playing in theaters for an entire year and later was rereleased due to its popularity.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The death of Richard, considering that Christopher Reeve himself died at the not particularly old age of 52 in real life.
• Narm: The sheer abruptness of Richard looking at the penny and being catapulted back to the present, especially with the dramatic musical sting and Elise screaming "REEEEE-chaaarrd!!!", is a bit too overwrought to completely work as a horrifying climax, and even comes off as unintentionally humorous, though it does succeed in snapping us out of the story the same way Richard is snapped out of his time travel.
• Narm Charm: The plot is clichéd, melodramatic, and there's more than one plothole... and somehow, it still works.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Teresa Wright appears in just two scenes at the beginning as Laura Roberts, the housekeeper for the elderly Elise.
  • Professor Finney (played by George Voskovec) appears in just one scene but is a crucial character, inspiring Richard's Mental Time Travel method.
• Retroactive Recognition: William H. Macy has a bit part in the opening scene as a theatre critic. George Wendt was in the scene too but it ended up as a Deleted Role (he's still credited). Future Saturday Night Live cast member Tim Kazurinsky is the photographer who takes the portrait of Elise.^note The Trivia section for the film on IMDB claims that Meg Ryan is the young woman with her back turned to the camera who's sitting at the same table as Richard at the library, but there's not independent confirmation of this, and the timeline of Ryan's life compared to the film suggests that she would've been finishing up high school in Connecticut at the same time the movie was being filmed in Michigan and Chicago.
• Spiritual Adaptation: In a lot of ways this is like an extended episode of Night Gallery, with its mix of human drama and fantasy, helped by the fact that Jeannot Szwarc and Richard Matheson both worked on Night Gallery. If it were a Night Gallery episode, it would've probably focused on a painting of Elise rather than a photograph.
• Strawman Has a Point: From Robinson's perspective, he has every right to be suspicious of a strange man who shows up out of nowhere and starts following Elise around for no discernible reason.