Top 10 Mind-Blowing Movies

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6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind


Writer Charlie Kaufman has come up with some pretty heavy premises in his time, but his best foray into the realms of the strange and bizarre came in 2004’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a sci-fi romance story notable for its mind-bending plot and mesmerizing visual style. Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet star as Joel and Clementine, two former lovers whose dysfunctional relationship leads them to a technology company that specializes in erasing painful memories from subjects’ minds. This ingenious premise allows director Michel Gondry to really have some fun playing with time and space, and in some scenes objects and people will disappear out of the shot as they are systematically being erased from a character’s memory. All this makes for some amazing sequences, but what really makes Eternal Sunshine such a weird trip are all the questions it forces the viewers to ask themselves: are we nothing but the sum total of our memories? Would it be worth it to delete bad experiences from your mind even if you lost a little of yourself in the process? That kind of depth of subject matter is a rare find in movies, and it’s a big part of what makes this film such a strange and memorable experience.

Most Unforgettable Scene:

The trip the film takes through Joel’s memories stops at a number of odd points in time, but by far the strangest and the funniest has got to be a scene where we’re taken all the way back to when Joel was a baby. Gondry shoots the scene from the floor up, as baby Joel sits under his kitchen table desperately trying to get his busy mother’s attention, nearly losing his mind in the process. It’s a hilarious, wonderfully imaginative scene, and easily one of the most memorable parts of the film.

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5. Primer


Time travel movies are always one of the easiest ways to throw an audience for a loop, simply because of the inherent paradoxes and logical traps that jumping back or forward in time creates. It’s a plot device that’s been used time and again, but rarely has it been employed as effectively as it was in Primer, a 2004 science fiction film about two struggling engineers who accidentally invent a time machine. Primer is a movie that’s notable for two things: being made independently for $7,000, and having one of the most convoluted, mind-blowing, and intentionally dense plot lines of all time. The filmmakers choose not to spoon-feed their audience any information, and the result is a movie that features a good deal of technical banter and hard science. The heady dialogue and twisty plotting is guaranteed to lose some of the audience, but for those that get into it, Primer is ultimately one of the most rewarding and thought-provoking movies of the last few years.

Most Unforgettable Scene:

This is a movie that is focused entirely on studying the paradox of time travel, so every little scene is a part of a bigger, more meaningful whole. But none of this is made apparent until about twenty minutes into the film, when the character of Abe takes his friend Aaron out to a field by promising to show him “the most important thing that any living organism has ever witnessed.” When they get there, Abe hands Aaron a pair of binoculars, and the two watch as Abe—a second Abe, fresh from the time machine—leaves the storage unit where the device is being stored.

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4. Mulholland Drive


Pretty much every movie director David Lynch has made could be put on this list, but if you’re looking for a good intro to the carnival of weirdness that is his career, start with Mulholland Drive, a 2001 psychological thriller that ranks among his best films. The story follows a young actress who moves to L.A. with the intent of breaking into the movie business. She soon meets up with a mysterious woman with amnesia, whom she tries to help recover her identity. From there, the narrative unravels into one of the most unsettling, complex, and downright fascinating movies of the last few years. It’s the kind of movie where each viewer is destined to come away with their own personal reading of what it means, and there’s little doubt that this is what Lynch, who has refused to comment on what he believes it’s all really about, always intended.

Most Unforgettable Scene:

Outside of its main plot, Mulholland Drive is made of up small vignettes, many of which are based around characters that have little or no contact with the major players. But it is one of these scenes that provides the film’s most unforgettable moment. The sequence takes place in a diner, where two men are eating breakfast. One begins to describe a terrible dream he’s been having, and as he does the details of it start to unfold around him, right down to the gruesome creature that’s hiding in the diner’s back alley. It’s a masterful scene that rivals the best horror films in terms of creepiness. Try as you might, you won’t easily forget it.

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3. The Matrix


What is there left to say about The Matrix? This film was a real game-changer in Hollywood, and when it came out in 1999 it immediately became established as one of the weirdest, most influential, and stylistically inventive movies of all time—and all this despite having Keanu Reeves in the starring role. The film is essentially based around a simple philosophical idea that’s been troubling philosophers since the days of Descartes: how do we know what is real? The filmmakers took this thought experiment and built their story around it, throwing in a dose of heavy firepower and kung fu for good measure, and the result is a movie that is at turns thought-provoking as well as pure, simple fun. It features some of the most eye-popping visual effects and action scenes in recent memory; but what The Matrix will really be remembered for is pushing the envelope of the kinds of subjects that can be tackled in movies, whether it’s the nature of sensation and experience or our ever-changing relationship with technology.

Most Unforgettable Scene:

During Neo’s training in how to bend the rules of space
and time while in the Matrix, there is a scene where he and Morpheus are transported to a dojo straight out of a Hong Kong action movie and forced to square off in hand-to-hand combat. All of the best parts of the film—from its intriguing concept to its superior fight choreography—are on display in this scene.

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2. Fight Club


1999 was a big year for mind-blowing movies, and of these Fight Club is the one that still hits the hardest. Insomuch as it can be explained, the story follows a nameless office drone (played by Edward Norton) that comes in to contact with a flamboyant soap salesman played by Brad Pitt. Together the two start an underground bare-knuckle boxing club, and after it catches on, they slowly mold their group of disaffected young men into an unofficial guerilla army that rebels against the status quo by performing bizarre acts of sabotage and vandalism. Anyone who’s seen Fight Club knows this is just a tiny part of the story, but that’s why this film continues to be one of the weirdest experiences you’ll ever have at the movies. The filmmakers keep throwing new curves at the audience, each more preposterous than the one before, and it all leads up to one of the most warped, mind-bending, and truly surprising twist endings of all time. But the film doesn’t just work on a gimmick. It’s also one of the most thematically audacious stories of the last few years, tackling everything from violence and masculinity to advertising and consumer culture.

Most Unforgettable Scene:

Fight Club is filled with memorable moments, some of them hilarious and some of them downright disturbing, but one of the best comes when Norton’s character, fed up with his job, literally beats himself up during a meeting with his boss. After punching himself in the face and throwing himself through a glass table, he tells security that his boss attacked him, and manages to walk away with a hefty settlement that allows him and Pitt to really shift their mischief making into high gear.