10. F For Fake (Vérités et mensonges, FR, 1974)
In this under-rated curiosity from the tail-end of the great Orson Welles’s career, the corpulent prankster presents us with a history of inventive and strange cases of fakery and fraud, and promises that "For the next hour everything in this film is strictly based on the available facts.". Trouble is, the film runs for eighty-five minutes, and Welles confesses at the end that he has been lying his head off for nearly half an hour!
9. The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
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8. The Game (1997)
The ennui of tycoon Michael Douglas’s life is broken by an unusual gift from his brother – participation in a life-altering game run by a Quitters Inc.-style company that seems to have the power to change an implausible number of real-world events. You’ll either be gratified and ‘made whole' by the ending of David Fincher’s typically off-beat thriller, or you’ll be throwing popcorn at the screen in disgust.
7. Paycheck (2003)
Philip K. Dick provides the base story as well-heeled reverse-engineer Ben Affleck gets paid to steal other manufacturers’ ideas and then forget that he ever did it (by chemically burning out memories in his brain). At the end of an unusually long and lucrative ‘blank period’, our hero finds that he seems to have conspired against himself, and sacrificed his huge paycheck [sic]for a few meaningless baubles. Only the envelope full of old tat can tell him why he did it…
6. Vanilla Sky (2001)
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5. The Matrix (1999)
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4. A Beautiful Mind (2001)
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3. Fight Club (1994)
David Fincher directs again, in a now-classic mindfuck thriller that went a long way to changing the direction of the genre. IKEA-loving loser Edward Norton is dazzled by his new friend, the unconventional and insurrectionist Tyler Durden, who has plans to zero Western society by a physical assault on the West’s banking system. The unlikely pair seem to have little in common – by the end, we find they have literally everything in common…
2. Memento (2001)
Batman Begins auteur Christopher Nolan made his name with this gritty Californian Film Noir, which finds assault-victim Guy Pearce unable to remember anything for more than five minutes, yet determined to solve the mystery of who killed his wife by tattooing clues on his body. Matrix veteran Joe Pantoliano makes his second venture into mindfuck territory as the cop apparently helping Pearce out – or is he…?
1. Total Recall (1990)
Arnie is the lowly construction worker dreaming of affording a trip to mars in Paul Verhoeven’s 1990 action/sci-fi outing, an ingenious adaptation and extension (by Alien creators Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett)of Philip K. Dick’s short story We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. Ultra-violent but also ultra-clever, Dicks ideas –as in Paycheck- are so dazzling as to overcome the film’s many shortcomings.
