Inception

AroView: Director Christopher Nolan conjures up yet another thrilling, immaculately shot blockbuster, starring Leonardo DiCaprio as the leader of a team who specalise in ‘psychic espionage’ – in other words, agents who plant themselves within the dreams of an individual in order to extract or plant crucial information.

Ticking all the boxes with consummate action sequences, dizzying special effects, and an urgent, multi-tiered storyline, this ingenious sci-fi roller-coaster, which speculates on the endless possibilities of dreams and dream manipulation (as a metaphor for cinema itself), is further evidence of Nolan’s mastery of the movie medium, both in form and content. Impressively, the mind-bending narrative is anchored by a well-developed character study (with DiCaprio’s protagonist battling demons within his own subconscious), while Elliot Page proves an excellent foil as the film’s voice of reason. Our only gripe is reserved for the Bond-inspired finale, and the perfectly conceptualised plot – at odds with the nature of ‘dream logic’, where everything perhaps shouldn’t always fit together…