25 Best Movies Of The Decade: 25

"Remember Sammy Jankis..."

25. Memento(2000)

Getting this out of the way by saying I hate the new Batman films. Everything is too stupidly "gritty" for my tastes and Christian Bale is a boring Batman and there are plot holes everywhere all the time.

That being said, those movies still look pretty good and that's because of Christopher Nolan. Memento is still Nolan's best work and it's in part of his own direction and in part Jonathan Nolan's writing.

Leonard Shelby is looking for the man who murdered his wife. The only problem is he suffers from anterograde amnesia, a condition that means he cannot retain memory of recent events, leaving him to tattoo information all over his body and documenting things with a Polaroid camera.

Of course, at the beginning of the film we see Shelby actually killing the man who killed his wife and the rest of the film plays backwards, almost mirroring Leonard's own short-term memory loss as it makes you encounter the same things he does while entirely in the dark. Well...wait, okay. Only half of the film is backwards. The part in color is backwards and the part in black and white is told chronologically, the story only meets in the ending. An ending, I might add, that gives a great twist to the entirety of Leonard Shelby's existence and an ending that only leaves us with knowledge of the future of Shelby and his friend Teddy.