Primer (2004)

Mind-bending thrillers like Primer are terrific viewing with your teenagers. Maybe if you're nice, they'll explain the ending to you.

Scary, puzzling, and different.

This film imagines its viewers to be smart, possessed of a decent attention span and game for a challenge. It doesn't happen all that often.

An unapologetically cerebral movie of ideas.

It's one thing to admire what writer/director/composer/actor Shane Carruth wrought on his $1.98 digicam budget; it's quite another to have to sit through the mind-numbing results.

The ingenious debut of writer-director Shane Carruth, who assembled the film on his home computer and also plays one of the two leads, is purposely designed to be a little bewildering.

Where's Doc Brown when you need him?

Shot for a begged and borrowed $7,000, 'Primer' looks it: grainy-ish, fuzzy on details and effects, acting running the gamut from A to B, and clipped incomprehensible technobabble for dialogue.

Ridiculous, confusing, vaguely noir-ish nonsense.

Discombobulating and mind-bending sci fi thriller. I think.

An exceptional science fiction film...

Oh, man, they don't make 'em like this often. A film unabashedly for the nerds in the audience (God love us), this is the type of film you could inflict upon your enemies, watching them squirm as they stare at the screen.