Movies that mess with your mind!

In preparation for Inception, Time magazine came out with a list of 10 top films that mess with your mind!

1. Last Year at Marienbad
"Didn't we meet at Marienbad last year?" an unnamed man asks an unnamed woman. So begins one of the most confusing (and frustrating) movies ever made. Two people are at a French château. One says they know each other. The other denies it. Back and forth they go, over and over, while director Alain Resnais' camera endlessly stalks the château's spooky corridors. All the while, organ music blasts out at unpredictable moments. Some well-dressed people stand in a sunlit garden. They cast shadows. The triangle-shaped trees surrounding them do not. There appears to be no plot. It's all very dreamlike. What is this movie about?



2. Memento

Before Christopher Nolan's Inception, there was Memento, a great big puzzle of a movie whose protagonist suffers from short-term-memory loss. With the help of Polaroids, notes and tattoos (give him credit, the man is dedicated), Leonard Shelby tries to track down his wife's murderer, known only as "John G." As he tries to piece everything together, so does the audience, which sees much of the action as fragments shown in reverse chronological order. We alternate between black-and-white and color, forward movement and back, truth and lies. Leonard doesn't know whom to trust ... and neither do we.

3. 2001: A Space Odyssey

Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi classic had apes, astronauts (some hibernating), a mysterious monolith — and HAL, a talking computer. Despite the presence of a verbally active machine, there isn't much dialogue in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The emphasis is on the visuals, whose grandiosity is matched only by the film's symphonic soundtrack. As TIME noted when the movie came out — in suitably trippy and pre-moon-landing 1968 — "Kubrick turns the screen into a planetarium gone mad and provides the viewer with the closest equivalent to psychedelic experience this side of hallucinogens." The film, based on a short story by Arthur C. Clarke, won an Oscar for visual effects.

4. El Topo

TIME's 1971 review of Chilean-Russian director Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo (The Mole) described the allegorical cult western film as "a vivid if ultimately passionless passion play." The film's 1970 trailer proclaimed, "It is a mystic film. It is tender. It is sexual." It is also a bit strange. A mysterious cowboy kills a group of outlaws before abandoning his naked son to ride off with a woman. El Topo (played by Jodorowsky) then embarks on a series of bizarre adventures. He challenges and defeats the four great gun masters of the land and then is betrayed by a woman with a man's voice who shoots him, leaving stigmata wounds. After El Topo heals and finds religious enlightenment, he begins an affair with a dwarf woman and helps a group of outcasts escape from a subterranean prison, only to see them massacred by cultists. That's when things really get weird. El Topo was a cult favorite at midnight showings in New York City before finally being released on DVD in 2007.

5. Pi

Maximillian Cohen is a mathematician burdened by crippling social anxieties and an all-consuming belief in the power of his science. As he's about to discover a singular mathematical solution to the patterns of the universe (or so he believes), Cohen falls prey to the schemes of a clutch of cutthroat Wall Street bankers and a sect of Hasidic Jewish Kabbalists, both keen to profit from his revelation. What follows in Darren Aronofsky's black-and-white meta-thriller is a hallucinatory collapse, with an eerie score that sounds out the tormented, psychic depths of a man driven to insanity by his quest for order.

6. The Oeuvre of David Lynch

It's hard to say which of David Lynch's works is the craziest. A profound madness lurks beneath them all, from Eraserhead (1977), his trippy film-school debut, to Blue Velvet (1986) and the Twin Peaks TV series, all the way to Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Dr. (2001) and Inland Empire (2006). Characters in Lynch films hover on the margins of reality, entering, through portal after portal, phantasmagoric dream worlds that are often as unsettling as they are hypnotic. Though Lynch runs a foundation that advocates a brand of popular meditation, there's little that's calming or stable about his vision. Beneath the thin sheen of daily life is an unfathomable, terrifying darkness. That, it seems, is what Lynch repeatedly tries to bring to light.

Read more about Fight Club, Brazil, Persona, and Blade Runner HERE