Memento - the scenes are shown end to beginning. At the start of the movie you see how it ended and throughout the movie you find out how they got there.
Inception - dream (within a dream (within a dream)), etc
What movies do you find clever?
The Usual Suspects - the classic “unreliable narrator” concept brought to film.
I’ll note that getting clever is a fine line. If the filmmaker gets too “clever,” he risks losing the audience. For example, I gave up two thirds of the way through Inception. I kept watching, but stopped trying to figure out what was happening.
A TV show, rather than a movie, but Key: The Metal Idol is like Lost if Lost had been planned out in advance, with a wide range of characters with a wide history, and the flashbacks and reveals are carefully planned out to flip around everything you think about every character 180 degrees every episode.
Note: Both of these movies were written by the same person. See also Westworld and Person of Interest.
Some people on this board hate Peter Greenaway’s movies, but they amuse me.
The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover and Drowning by Numbers are like logic puzzles. You spend the early part of the film figuring out the rules of the game, then spend the rest of the film trying to see if he ever breaks the rules. (If he broke the rules in DbN, I didn’t catch it. He does break the rules in CTWL. Was he making some kind of grand artistic statement, or did he just not have enough money for another set of costumes?)
In The Draughtsman’s Contract, the sex and violence are just a pretext to get you into the theater, so he can give you a lecture on drafting and architecture.
In The Pillow Book, the sex and violence are just a pretext to get you into the theater, so he can give you a lecture on paper-making and poetry.
In Prospero’s Books . . . oh, who cares? It’s Shakespeare, with a bunch of naked people running around in the background! It’s just fun to watch.
I’ve always liked “Being There” with Peter Sellers.
The Gardiner was a very simple man, however he rose to fame because people thought has was speaking in profound metaphors.
Add The Prestige to the Nolan brothers’ list of clever movies.
“After The Dark” is a good one.
However, that little twist at the very end was beyond stupid. Have no idea why they put that in there.
We mock him now, but M. Night Shyamalan did a great job with The Sixth Sense. The clues were there throughout the movie but he successfully misdirected our attention.
It’s almost a cliché, but stop and marvel at just how much exposition they cram in, without seeming like they’re cramming it in, as BACK TO THE FUTURE works through maybe 20 solid minutes of ‘necessity’ passed off as ‘conversational’.
One of my favorite clever movies was “The Last of Sheila.” The clue to the mystery
is right there in the title.Not to mention the (mostly) wonderful cast, including James Mason, Dyan Cannon and Joan Hackett.
There’s also “The Other” also from way back when, based on a novel by Tom Tryon. I thought this was a very fair surprise ending (i.e. the clues were there all along). Also, it had Uta Hagen in it, and how often do you get to see her on screen? Plus Diana Muldaur, back before she was annoying.
Thread relocated from IMHO to Cafe Society.
It was an excellent movie. He’s mocked now because all of his other movies were disappointing.
“This is Spinal Tap”. Well, I guess it’s a fine line.
Well, perhaps many of us went into the first one not knowing there was even a big twist? So when it came it was unexpected and frankly awesome. After that, we now knew he was the guy who puts twists in, so we were watching his movies with different expectations.
Even if I hadn’t seen the Sixth Sense there wasn’t any kind of twist worth mentioning in his other movies. Sixth Sense was done well, maybe an accident, maybe he had the right help, maybe the actors were better, whatever, it’s more than just an unexpected twist that makes the difference.
I found Primer pretty clever.
Identity with John Cusack
Maximilian Schell got an Oscar nomination for The Man In The Glass Booth.
Part One: the simple default is that everything fits and he is who he says he is; but there’s reason to believe he isn’t, since he does dubious stuff. Part Two: this story would explain that stuff. Part Three: you know what else can explain everything? Yeah, you do; we already covered that; it was the simplest fit, remember?
That’s some fair-play mystery stuff right there.
I was just thinking those when I read your OP.
To the Nolan mix, I would add *Dunkirk *with it’s triple timeline narrative.
The Three Flavours Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz and The World’s End) are all fairly clever
Following. I only own 3 or 4 DVDs and that’s one of them. It’s one of the few movies I’ve told people they need to watch and handed them the DVD. Every person I lent it to had their mind blown.
Also, it’s Christopher Nolan’s first movie.