Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Leoni Haney Yes, absolutely, there is fun to be had, as well as many, many things to go boom, all amid an atmospheric urban jungle.

NateWatchesCoolMovies Mindscape, given the less tantalizing title 'Anna' upon release, is a thinking person's thriller, and perhaps a little bit too much so. In the near future, or perhaps some alternate reality, some humans have evolved into pseudo clairvoyants who can enter the memories of other people and interact with their subjects within them. This talent has been trademarked by law enforcement, who employ 'memory detectives' to psychologically resolve conflict or retrieve otherwise out of reach information. Mark Strong is one such man, but his talents have dimmed a bit following the deaths of his family and a crippling stroke. Hauled out of retirement by his former boss (Brian Cox, sly as ever), he finds himself tasked with navigating the labyrinthine mind of Anna (Taissa Farmiga) a girl accused of murder and deemed a potential sociopath pending diagnosis. The film is deliberately dense and elliptical, not standard Hollywood fare at all, which is nice to see, but it also trips just a little bit on its own cognitive aspirations, especially in the third act. It's one of those pieces that's less like The Cell, and more like Vanilla Sky or Danny Boyle's Trance (two absolute favourites of mine) where so much of the story wades through muddy mindgames that at a certain point we think to ourselves 'well who's to say if any of this is actually real if it's gotten so complex', and indeed it's very difficult to piece together what has transpired here, especially with a conclusion that would require multiple viewings to even get an inkling. It's stylish as all hell though, given a clinical, steely grey palette punctuated by flourishes of startling red to show the capacity for violence lurking just out of sight within the opaque and enigmatic human psyche. The acting is top tier as well; Strong is reliably committed and intense, Farmiga is deeply disconcerting as the most fascinating and ambiguous character, showing blossoming talent that I look forward to seeing more of, while Cox steals his scenes as per usual. The film trips over itself a few times and like I said, overly convoluted, but it's one mesmerizing effort for the most part, albeit after a second or third viewing.

saturasdemon Mindscape is a movie where You as the viewer should pay close attention and try figuring out whats going on. I would recommend watching this alone so you can immerse yourself fully into it. This film does not explain everything in the first 5 minutes, it wants you to follow, so don't give up and you will be rewarded. Watch it twice if you have questions (I had a lot), but thats the whole charm of it, a movie you think about longer than you watch it. Besides that, the movie is beautiful shot well directed and has very good actors despite the fact that I did not know all of them which is kind of refreshing.This is a definitive must watch 8/10.

vincentlynch-moonoi I've seen worse. This isn't too bad.Problem number 1, at least for me, is that I thought it was some sort of a horror movie. Perhaps that's my mistake. Instead it's a psychological thriller.Problem number 2 is that there are no really good acting performances in this film. Everyone does "okay".All this is not to say that the film doesn't have its moments. The concept of a "mind detective" is actually kinda interesting. And, any movie that has a double twist at the end -- neither of which I saw coming -- can't be all bad.But here's the bottom line. If I had it to do over again, I wish I'd not wasted 99 minutes. I would compare this to a moderate t.v. movie.

create The preposterous is something many filmmakers today take for granted. I keep smelling an air of carelessness in the plots of many of TV programs and films that reveal a disdain storytellers have for their audience. Maybe they think that since moviegoers spend a billion on seeing The Avengers, Harry Potter & Pirates of the Caribbean, they must be willing to buy anything. I sincerely thought that style of filmmaking went into the production of Anna...John Washington is a "Memory Detective". He does some type of Star Trek mind meld with crime victims, in order to... well, that's one of the fuzzy things that the storytellers never really firm up. Does he go into the minds of these victims to recover lost memories like license plate numbers, or phone numbers? Of course that theory is blown out of the water with the first scene when he goes deep into the plight of a survivor of an assault, so that he can...well, again, they never really address why. But it's a salacious assault. And it looks good cinematically.While John is peeping in on that assault, his "memories intrude". He remembers that his wife died…not of an assault, but hey. His intrusive memories cause him to have a stroke, and he's out of the game for months. He is "lucky" to get his next assignment: making a sixteen year old girl end her hunger strike.Why they would call in a "Memory Detective" and not a counselor is up for debate. Are hunger strikes now a crime? But enter John Washington who mind melds with Anna, a troubled girl who has troubled girl issues – Sex, Drugs, Money and Art – that play well cinematically. John memory reads her, and finds after a good thirty minutes of story that a crime might have occurred. Perhaps the "Memory Detective" Agency's motto is if you look hard enough, everyone has committed a crime.Actually, if they had gone into depth on a story such as everyone commits crime, this would have been a better film. Or maybe if they would have expanded on the sub-plot that memories aren't very reliable, a good sci-fi story could have come into play. Or maybe if they would have gotten rid of that last twenty minutes, this wouldn't have been such an awful film. But neither the director, Jorge Dorado, nor the writers, Guy Holmes and Martha Holmes thought to do this.It's a mystery where this film takes place, both in time and location. They have very American looking shots of skyscrapers and bridges. (They filmed in Spain.) A scandal brews over an affair of a Senator – but we don't know if he's a U.S. Senator. The writers never give us any concept of how the "Memory Detective" came to be accepted by the courts. But we find out from a hokey newscast that "Memory Detectives" are treated as star investigators, even though in the same newscast it is pointed out that these star detectives "aren't as reliable as DNA".No. Really?