One of the best movies I've ever watched ...

Rating: 10/10 (11 May 2003)

An amazing movie! Much has been said about the movie, the screenplay, direction and performances. I'm not going to add much here. I'm amazed that Joe Pantoliano didn't get nominated for an acting award for this movie! He gave by far the best performance in the movie. Stephen Tobolowsky and Guy Pearce were also amazing. And I'm also amazed that Nolan didn't get nominated for the best director in many major awards, including Academy awards and the Golden globes. What a direction! Hats off!

I give it a hearty 10/10!
Onto the movie ... There can be many interpretations of the "ending" and the entire movie itself.
SPOILER ALERT!!! VIRTUALLY ENTIRE PLOT GIVEN AWAY!!! BEWARE!!! BEWARE!!! STRONG RECOMMENDATION: DO NOT READ AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED THE MOVIE!!! PLEASE WATCH THE MOVIE AT LEAST ONCE! (You've been warned enough!)
I found this interesting question on a few reviews, including Ebert's. (I personally think Ebert missed a number of points in this movie, very rare for him to do so.) The question is this: if the last thing the main character remembers is his wife dying, then how does he remember that he has short-term memory loss?
I kept thinking about it quite a bit. When I recently watched the movie again, it clicked to me. Remember he is always looking at the back of his left palm (at a very prominently visible place) where he has tattooed "Remember Sammy Jankis"? It is to remind him of his condition. It makes sense because he always associates his condition with that of Sammy Jankis. This is my take on it.
There was also another comment in Ebert's review: Nolan's device of telling his story backward, or sort of backward, is simply that--a device.

I disagree, because, what I got out of the movie was this: It doesn't matter whether the cop-character Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) or Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss) are nice people or not. It doesn't even matter whether Leonard even found the murderer or not. What the movie is really about is the helplessness of Leonard. Granted, he writes copious notes, tatoos stuff on his body and painstakingly lives as much an ordered life as possible given his condition. But ultimately, he is human. In the "climax", when he says to himself that yes, he is going to play a game and make Teddy his target, it so amazingly brings out the helplessness of the character. It would be even more ironical if what Teddy said (as to Leonard being the real "murderer" of his wife, i.e., the story he attributes to Sammy Jankis,(did leonard succeed in making a long-term memory by training, after all?)) is true. The entire life of Lenoard is now being played in his mind as some "normal" life of revenge but he really has a psychological condition. And since we see the movie in Leonard's point of view, we are inclined to believe his thoughts and notes. Only in the "end" is his "condition" revealed to us. Therefore the movie had to be told backward. If we knew of his helplessness beforehand, I wonder what is left of the movie!
A personal message that I got from the movie: We always live under the illusion that we are in control of our lives, at least we want to live so. Is it possible? How do our helplessness and weaknesses and subjectivities manipulate us?