Memento

This artfully structured thriller begins with a Polaroid snapshot of blood-splattered tiles that fades and gets sucked back into its camera. It ends with an ambiguous twist to a murder mystery. In between, writer-director Christopher Nolan toys with our minds as each scene ends where the previous scene began in a sort of tidal regression and progression of story and character. A one-sided phone conversation (filmed in black and white) bridges the scenes as an insurance investigator (Guy Pearce), who is handicapped by the loss of his short-term memory, tries to track down his wife’s killer. This sort of back-to-the-future crime story about fact versus memory, intuition and the ability to feel time is marred by a bit of short-term memory of its own: a prominent lip cut on one femme fatale repeatedly disappears and reappears in two key scenes.