The movie opens in reverse. A Polaroid picture fades away. A gun swallows a bullet. The blood of a dead man sucks back into his head and he gets off the floor. Director Christopher Nolan is messing with your concept of time and place. Next Lenny Shelby (played with enormous talent by Guy Pearce, the self-righteous cop from L.A. Confidential) starts talking in second person: "So where are you? You’re in some motel room. You just wake up. There’s the key. It feels like maybe it’s just the first time you’ve been there, but perhaps you’ve been there a week, or three months." Your feeling of disorientation grows. You find out Lenny is suffering from anterograde memory loss, a rare post-trauma brain problem where he can’t form new memories. It happened when he found his murdered wife and was hit on the head by the killer. Now he wants to find the killer, but he can’t even remember whom he’s discussed it with. He carries Polaroids of people and places in his pocket to help him remember. He has "John G. raped and murdered your wife" tattooed across his chest to help him remember. But who is John G.? As the movie unfolds, your disorientation starts to make sense. Nolan is unfolding the story in reverse, beginning with the end and ending with the beginning.

Director Christopher Nolan has produced one of the most mesmerizing and captivating indie films in years. Like a young prodigy drunk on his own talent, he has thrown everything but the kitchen sink into this film. Snatches of Welles-ian film noir (think Touch of Evil) bang against the surrealism of Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. We are assaulted by confusing camera angles (brilliant work by Wally Pfister) like those in Polanski’s Repulsion. We’re given surprises at the level of The Sixth Sense or The Usual Suspects. And the breathless feeling is pushed over the top by the virtuoso stop-start film cutting (kudos to editor Dody Jane Dorn). All of the actors do a wonderful job, especially Pearce, who somehow gives us an out-of-control and dangerous character that you still feel sad for. But the star of Memento is Nolan. His writing is faultless. His directing heralds the arrival of a potential wunderkind.

Many thanks to Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment for giving us this superb film the way it deserves to be seen. There is clear anamorphic picture with very little edge enhancement, first-rate depiction of dark colors, and wide-ranging and undistorted sound. Also included is the IFC interview with Nolan conducted by Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times. Without getting too techie, Elvis probes Nolan’s creative process and brings new and additional meaning to the film.