Some movies are designed so anyone can follow them. Even if you miss the start, answer a few texts and own a cat that likes jumping in front of the TV, there's still a pretty good chance you'll have a rough idea what's going on. Not so for every film.

Here's to the best movies that require you to watch, re-watch, take detailed notes and listen to the director's commentary before you actually know what you've just seen.

1. Naked Lunch

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Written by William S. Burroughs as a series of vignettes that can be read in any order, David Cronenberg decided to make his adaptation even more confusing by telling a completely different story. Mixing up bits of the book with snippets of Burroughs' own life story, Cronenberg gives us a portrait of the artist as a hallucinating drug addict / chain-smoking alien / talking insect / bumhole-typewriter thing.

2. Primer

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As Doc Brown and evil Bill and Ted will one day tell you, there's nought more confusing than time travel. Most movies get around the sticky space-time continuum issue with ignorance, plot-holes and a cool soundtrack, but Primer isn't most movies. Written and directed by Shane Carruth, a former engineer with a first-class maths degree, the film goes to great lengths to explain exactly how time travel might work, but assumes a level of intelligence and observation on the part of the viewer that matches his own - which means you might want to watch it with a pad and pencil.

3. Southland Tales

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Richard Kelly's follow-up to Donnie Darko starts with a nuclear war in an alternate reality. So far so good. The world is powered by wave machines that are slowly ripping holes in time. Okay, still sort of with ya... Cut to the future and Sarah Michelle Geller is a pornstar, there's two Sean William Scotts and everyone's involved in a conspiracy wrapped in an enigma wrapped in God only knows what - with Justin Timberlake lip-synching to The Killers, a climactic dance number between Rocky and Buffy, and a floating van full of guns that prevents the apocalypse.

4. Pi

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Darren Aronofsky used the poster for Pi to weed out anyone who wouldn't get it. Instead of calling the movie "Pi", he called it "π", the Greek letter that guarantees smugness in anyone who asks for the right film when they get to the box office. To be fair though, it's a heady, obsessive exploration of the relationship between religion, philosophy and mathematics, so anyone expecting a movie about steak and kidney might be disappointed. On the plus side, a supporting role from the old mute dude from Breaking Bad as a maths professor.

5. Only God Forgives

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"The original concept for the film was to make a movie about a man who wants to fight God," said director Nicholas Winding Refn in his press notes. "Faith is based on the need for a higher answer but most of the time, we don't know what the question is. In this way, the film is conceived as an answer, with the question revealed at the end." So, the question is why that Thai dude cut off Ryan Gosling's arms before doing karaoke… And the answer is 90-odd minutes of Gosling staring at a wall?

6. 2001: A Space Odyssey

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Stanley Kubrick's "epic drama of adventure and exploration" starts off with a load of monkeys hooting around a big black brick. Skipping forward a few millennia, the rest of the film takes place in space, before the brick makes a reappearance, the screen fills with abstract coloured lights for a full nine minutes and the main character is transformed into a giant baby in a see-through egg. Brilliant meditation on the existential trajectory of human evolution it might be, but also… WTF?

7. Memento

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There's a good reason we don't read books upside down. Or look at paintings in the dark. Or eat our pudding before our main. Messing with the basic storytelling rules that have been set in stone since people knew how to set things in stone, Christopher Nolan's Memento runs backwards. Putting us in the mind of a man without memories, the film mixes the past and the present tense - with the start and the end meeting somewhere in the middle. Brilliant but also somewhat… gnifusoc.

8. Synecdoche, New York

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Another film that tries to wear its smug smartness on its sleeve, Charlie Kaufman's postmodern directorial debut is strictly for people who can pronounce the word "synecdoche" without looking like they're trying (and are aware that there's a county in New York state called Schenectady, about which this is a feeble pun). Blurring the lines between art and reality, Kaufman uses a real actor to play a fake director staging a fake play about real people played by real actors that are played by fake lookalikes. FYI, it's "Si-NECK-duh-kee".

9. Lost Highway

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It's a tough call picking the most confusing David Lynch movie, but Lost Highway is made with "such breezy contempt for the audience", as Roger Ebert famously put it, that Lynch even had the chutzpah to change his actors halfway through the movie without any explanation. Essentially the story of a man who murders his wife, the labyrinthine plot follows multiple characters, personas and realities to delve deep into the mind of a killer. We still don't really know who Dick Laurent is though…

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