Memento

A very sly film that begins at the end and moves backwards to the middle, never quite reaching the beginning. The visually stunning Guy Pearce stars as a man who has no capacity to form new memories, so he tattoos information on his body, leaves himself notes, and attempts, through a set of cryptic communiqués to himself, to get revenge on the man who murdered his wife. There are layers of irony in this well-constructed noir, not the least of which is that it requires a great deal of memory on the audience's part to piece the story together. Although ultimately it's more puzzle than movie, it's still riveting and has that rare feature of assuming that its audience is more intelligent than the average rhesus monkey. Well, more intelligent than the average rhesus monkey that hasn't taken the super-monkey serum.