Edge Of Tomorrow

I love time travel movies, and this time travel movie takes the tested-and-true Groundhog Day blueprint and applies it, beat-for-beat, to an alien battle movie. Starship Troopers-meets-Groundhog Day would be the shortest and most accurate description.

In Edge of Tomorrow, the goal is not to become a better person and win the love of Andie McDowell (thank God, that's happened in enough movies) but to kill the queen bee of an alien invasion force, and do it in one "life", first-person-shooter style. If Cruise were a decorated and respected war hero, he could probably muster enough troops, weapons, and support to blow up the moon on the first try, so to make it interesting, Lt. Col. William Cage is a coward and a deserter who has been stripped of his rank and kicked down to the lowest of the grunts.
Once Cage gets his bearings, he allies himself with Rita Vrataski, an English soldier who has lived this time loop before, and has been catapulted to heroic supersolider status as a result of her success on the battlefield. What's fascinating about the middle third of the movie, is that Cage and Vrataski attempt their near-impossible mission possibly dozens of times...but it's always the first time for Vrataski.
Doug Liman's direction, and an airtight screenplay by Christopher McQuarrie, Jez Butterworth, and John-Henry Butterworth exploits every interesting angle of time travel, and living the same day over and over again, even going farther than Groundhog Day. Andie McDowell never really realizes that Bill Murray has spent weeks and weeks with her, falling in love with her- she only mostly believes his story once the movie is nearly complete.
On the other hand, Liman gives the movie a soft touch too, there's plenty of humor (and a priceless Bill Paxton as a DI) to make the grim action go down easier. My Stub Hubby grade: A-minus for derivative aliens and yet another movie with soliders in exo-skeleton suits.
Writer Notes: Christopher McQuarrie most famously wrote The Usual Suspects, but he's also more recently written two Tom Cruise movies, Valkyie (reteaming with director Bryan Singer) and Jack Reacher (which McQuarrie also directed).