Short-term memory loss is such a perfect metaphor for going to the movies that it was inevitable someone would make a movie about it. The ticket you buy is a round trip to oblivion. In the dark you forget about yourself; then the screen tickles your brain with thousands of images, not more than a few of which will survive the walk back to the parking lot.

In Memento, the second film from Christopher Nolan (after 1999’s low-budget Following), a former insurance investigator named Leonard (Guy Pearce) devotes his life to finding the man who killed his wife. Trouble is, the same assault that took her life also damaged his brain, leaving him unable to form new memories. So to keep track of where he is with his quest, he shoots Polaroids, writes notes to himself, and has the main certainties of the case tattoo’d on his body.

Nolan tells the story in a tricky way that moves backward in time and restarts every 10 minutes or so, as Leonard finds himself in a new situation and must puzzle out how he got there and what it means. This oppressive narrative technique makes it impossible for us not to share Leonard’s condition: we’ve all lost our memory, and we keep losing it over and over as the film unfolds. The movie’s cleverness is satisfying on a brute level but also irritating, especially since Nolan and Pearce conspire to make Leonard as unpleasant as possible. And the intrinsic unimportance of the noir plot to which the memory-loss format is tied reminds us that whatever else Nolan — with his impeccable intelligence — is doing, he’s still only playing a game that’s been played so many times it’s academic whether someone with a new style can score a little higher than usual. But it’s pointless to knock Memento. The proof of the film’s success is that 10 minutes after you’ve seen it, it’s exactly as if you hadn’t