Memento Reviews

treats the audience with respect without being overly pretentious

Full Review | Original Score: B

Occasionally the film trips over its own complexity, but it's tense, devious and evokes Leonard's disorientation quite brilliantly. Operation of heavy machinery after watching is a definite no-no.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

More a puzzle than a meaningful story, it reminds me of how Edmund Wilson compared reading a mystery to eagerly unpacking a box of excelsior, only to find a few rusty nails at the bottom.

Full Review

A brilliantly told mindbender, a perfect example of how the right approach to storytelling can elevate a film

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Nolan built a better mousetrap of a neo-noir, using the tricky gimmick of a complex, purposefully disorienting narrative. [Blu-ray]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4

Memento is one of those jigsaw puzzles whose pieces snap together more tightly with each viewing. Fueling it all is a performance by Guy Pearce that's as indelible as the tattoo ink covering his body.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

Innovative movie with a mature premise.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

More than an enigmatic, jittery, occasionally funny treatise on vengeance's fruitlessness, "Memento" never abandons an emotional quandary: How can a man unable to feel time expect to heal? Leonard loses himself, as we all do, in habit and repetition.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Christopher Nolan's breakthrough feature is a terrific film noir, witty, inventive, thrilling and intriguing from the first frame to the very last.

Full Review | Original Score: A

Nolan's sophomore effort is a near peerless psychological thriller.

Full Review | Original Score: 92/100

"Memento" is a crime-revenge story that relies on its one big gimmick.

Full Review | Original Score: C-

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5

The film is cool, contemplative, a puzzle movie in which you see the finished puzzle right up front and then watch as it disassembles itself.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5

Of all the ironies which fill the film, the most complementary may be that this is film which will not soon be forgotten.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

I am neither upset nor disturbed by Memento , only vaguely dissatisfied. I simply don't buy Jonathan Nolan's thesis that audiences know all the tropes and tricks of crime thrillers backward and forward.

Full Review

Just when you thought film noir was dead and buried, along comes the memorably mind-bending Memento.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

There's grade A work from all concerned, especially Pearce, but in the end this is Nolan's film. And he delivers, with a vengeance.

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Memento is as bleak as they come. But sometimes staring into humanity's heart of darkness is a healthy thing.

Full Review | Original Score: A-

Fans of film noir and The Usual Suspects will find much to appreciate about Memento, with its circular loop of lost memory.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4

Ironically, it's one of the most memorable films so far this year.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5