★ 9.0major
Denis Villeneuve's 2016 first-contact drama opens on a linguist raising a daughter who doesn't survive childhood, then spends two hours on the painstaking work of talking to aliens. The two threads turn out to be the same thread -- told at an angle most viewers won't catch the first time.
★ 7.5moderate
James Ward Byrkit's 2013 micro-budget thriller traps eight friends in one house on the night a comet passes overhead -- and lets a single dinner party quietly stop making sense. It's proof a twist doesn't need a budget, just a set of rules the characters (and the audience) have to work out in real time.
★ 8.0mind-bending
Richard Kelly's 2001 cult favorite opens with a jet engine falling out of a clear sky into a teenager's empty bedroom, and spends 28 days building toward an answer nobody in the film can fully explain. It became a midnight-movie staple for a reason that has nothing to do with the rabbit costume.
★ 8.0moderate
Christopher Nolan's 2010 heist film follows a thief who steals secrets from people's dreams, hired for a job that requires planting an idea instead. The way the film chooses to end its own story -- and what it deliberately refuses to confirm about the man at the center of it -- has kept audiences arguing for over a decade.
★ 8.5mind-bending
Based on Robert Heinlein's "'--All You Zombies--'," this 2014 time-travel thriller follows an agent on one last assignment: catch a bomber before his next attack. The stranger telling him a life story over one slow night at a 1970 bar is not nearly as uninvolved as he looks.
★ 7.5moderate
Two garage engineers accidentally build a box that folds time, then start using it to get ahead on stock trades. What they do with it after that is deliberately difficult to track on a single viewing -- the film has no intention of making it easier for you.
★ 7.5major
M. Night Shyamalan's 2000 origin story plays out as a quiet character study between a man who can't get hurt and the frail stranger who's convinced him there's a reason why. The reveal about that stranger's own role in the story reframes the entire film's structure, not just its final scene.