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

Scary, puzzling, and different. full review

An unapologetically cerebral movie of ideas. full review

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. full review

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. full review

It takes a lot for a movie to surprise today's jaded, seen-it, bought-the- PlayStation-version sci-fi fan. Primer can. Let it. full review

A jigsaw puzzle made of pieces that may or may not fit together, it assumes the intelligence and interest of its audience, a brave move that pays off big.

Carruth challenges us to imagine the impossible, then asks us to consider the moral, ethical and spiritual implications of what we have witnessed, and put those considerations on equal footing with man's desire to go where no man has gone before. full review

Like watching something that's always on the verge of being a movie.

It's different, that's all, and it's good because it's different. full review

It is maddening, fascinating and completely successful. full review

Has such an engaging, offbeat first half that it's all the more frustrating when it gets lost inside its own convolutions and delayed revelations. full review

It has all the hallmarks of an amateur production: questionable sound and picture quality, crude performances, and dubious editing. full review

Incredibly confusing but oddly compelling. full review

The first thing Shane Carruth should have done as a director was fire himself as an actor, because I think he gives a terrible performance. full review

It's dense, and in a way that doesn't begin to reward the effort required to untie it. full review

By turns inventive, confounding and obtuse, it doesn't always work, but it challenges, nonetheless. full review

What's impressive -- aside from the fact that Carruth got the thing made in the first place -- is that the movie's tone skates right between coherence and an appreciation for endless, even infinite possibilities. full review

Writer-director Shane Carruth makes a low-tech, low-budget entry into a staple of science fiction and manages to make it feel like a genre you've never been to before.

A brilliant little indie thriller.