Reviews - Memento (2000)

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Taglines: Some memories are best forgotten

Writers: Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan

Stars: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano, Mark Boone Junior, ...

Memento chronicles two separate stories of Leonard, an ex-insurance investigator who can no longer build new memories, as he attempts to find the murderer of his wife, which is the last thing he remembers. One story line moves forward in time while the other tells the story backwards revealing more each time.

100 | William Arnold

A delicious one-time treat.

100 | Lawrence Toppman

Pearce, who's in every scene except the Sammy flashbacks, dominates the picture through his feral performance.

100 | Owen Gleiberman

Memento, which may be the ultimate existential thriller, has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream.

100 | Jack Mathews

One of the most original and ultimately confounding mind games to reach the screen since "The Usual Suspects."

100

A gripping, utterly unexpected noir, glinting with bits of poetry and a hard, deadpan humor.

90 | Kenneth Turan

A provocatively structured and thrillingly executed film noir, an intricate, inventive use of cinema's possibilities that pushes what can be done on screen in an unusual direction.

90 | Peter Travers

Like the best filmmakers at Sundance 2001, Nolan leaps into the wild blue and dares us to leap with him. Go for it.

90 | Desson Thomson

You're exhilarated from beginning to end.

90 | J. Hoberman

The video stores are filled with examples of retro-noir and neo-noir, but Christopher Nolan's audacious timebender is something else. Call it meta-noir.

90 | Dana Stevens

A brilliant feat of rug-pulling, sure to delight fans of movies like "The Usual Suspects" and "Pi."

90 | Rita Kempley

Unforgettable, especially in Pearce's startling performance.

90 | Maitland McDonagh

Enthralling or infuriating.

90 | Lisa Nesselson

Deconstructs time and space with Einstein-caliber dexterity in the service of a delectably disturbing tale of revenge.

88 | Mike Clark

Has the unanticipated craft and artfully ambiguous appeal of last year's "Croupier," a movie whose art-house word-of-mouth success could be duplicated here.

88 | Mark Caro

A puzzle movie in which the puzzle is actually worth the time and effort to solve.

80 | Peter Brunette

Despite the first-rate acting, the narrative is the star of this show, so much so that you feel yourself occasionally losing interest in the travails of the characters. Instead, you hang on every word and every tiny object, every cut and bruise in the frame, looking for clues that will help you make sense of what's going on.

80 | Peter Rainer

Nolan sustains an arty note of existential dread that probably will work better for noir-steeped film critics and overserious philosophy grad students than for general audiences, but he brings off a few brisk bravura moments.

80 | Ella Taylor

If nothing else, Memento is a savvy comment on the queasy uncertainties of the postmodern condition, in which history goes no further back than yesterday's news, and knowledge is supplanted by "information" from a tumult of spin-controlled, unreliable narrators.

75 | David Sterritt

This unconventionally structured thriller moves at an energetic pace, spurred by a string of clever variations on conventional film narrative.

75 | Roger Ebert

A diabolical and absorbing experience.

75 | Edward Guthmann

Bound to be talked about, debated and eviscerated far more than it's understood.

70 | David Edelstein

It's scary to have to puzzle out a plot line scene by scene -- scary and exhilarating, at least for an hour.

50 | Gregory Weinkauf

Feels mostly like an audacious prank.

40 | Charles Taylor

Whenever Harris or Tobolowsky come on-screen they stop Memento dead in its clever tracks. You want to tell Nolan to stop all the po-mo deconstructive game playing and pay attention to the two human beings in front of him.