Memento review: Read EW's original take on the thriller

In Christopher Nolan’s dizzy and hypnotic thriller, Leonard (Guy Pearce), a man who has lost his short-term memory, is locked in a mission of blind vengeance. He lives in a perpetual present tense, his mind rewinding, over and over, in an endless loop, a movement reflected in the obsessive architecture of the film itself, which is literally structured backward. As Leonard tracks his investigation employing a series of Polaroid photographs and body tattoos, he’s like a man trying to wrap his mind around the question mark of his own identity. Memento has a spooky repetitive urgency that takes on the clarity of a dream; it’s like an Oliver Sacks case study played as malevolent film noir. Pearce, frantic and disheveled, lends even the smallest events the aura of a life-or-death search, a quest for meaning. A