Original and intellectually stimulating

Rating: 8/10 (7 March 2001)

Very few if any modern movies can justifiably be called "film noir." MEMENTO is one of them.
It chronicles a man's search for his wife's killer. However, the man has a memory condition by which he cannot remember anything for longer than 15 minutes, so he constantly takes Polaroids, writes notes, and even gets tattoos to remember important information. To place the audience inside this man's head, the filmmakers tell the story backwards so that we, too, never know what just happened. It is a brilliant use of this device, for it's not just a gimmick -- it's the main way the movie achieves subjectivity with its main character. And in doing so, we share his paranoia and displacement, and that is a key element of "film noir."
It's purposefully ambiguous even to the end. You will be thinking and talking about it long afterwards. Very good film, well worth seeing.