Inception

The best movie we have seen in years. DiCaprio's character, Dom Cobb, works as an "extraction" expert, able to enter someone's subconscious and purloin valuable information for a fee. (He's the Carnac the Magnificent of corporate espionage, albeit working with more electronics and pharmaceuticals.) Ken Watanabe's impossibly rich industrialist hires Cobb not to extract but to implant an idea in the brain of a rival businessman ( Cillian Murphy). If this idea to break up his family company succeeds, Watanabe's empire expands, and Cobb — an international fugitive, sought by extradition authorities — can go home to America and his beloved kids. Dom and a team of specialists, including a right-hand man (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), an architect (Ellen Page), and a "forger" (Tom Hardy) who can morph into another person's identity, have developed techniques to actually enter a subject's dream. And once on the premises, they can steal secrets. Demand for their services is great, and the team zips around the world. But Dom, a man with secrets of his own, wants to quit the business and return home to his kids. To do so, he takes on One Last Job, a mission with a twist: Rather than extracting an idea buried deep in a dreamer's subconscious, Dom must plant the seed of an idea that will, in waking life, take root — an experimental process called inception. Ken Watanabe plays the tycoon who hires Dom for the job, angling to undo a competitor. Cillian Murphy plays the mark, the heir to a rival business fortune. In a tall tale where every character's name is crafted to signify something to cultists, naming Murphy's character Robert Fischer is a sure sign that Nolan is setting up a gleefully rigged game of chess. Speaking of names, consider Dom's beautiful, haunting wife, played with tenderness and a wiry undercurrent of malice by Marion Cotillard: Her name is Mal. As in the Latin for evil. Before you can understand Inception, you have to understand extraction. It's when one person enters another person's mind through a dream and steals an idea or information. (Extraction is such a potent threat in big business espionage that high-level CEO-types train their subconscious to seek out and eliminate the threat of a foreign extractor.) Inception is the opposite of that - an outsider planting an idea and convincing the dreamer that he created it. It's rare, if not completely unheard of, and that's exactly what Cobb has to do if he wants to clear his name to return home. If your head is already spinning with questions, you won't have time to ask them before an entire city block twists and collapses on itself or the perspective shifts, altering your entire perception. Inception is more about the answers than the questions. Writer-director Christopher Nolan knows to illustrate his answers with actual situations in the film -- so that our doubts and uncertainties are given visual proof.
Following up on such ingenious and intriguing films as "The Dark Knight" and "Memento," Nolan has outdone himself. "Inception" puts him not only at the top of the heap of sci-fi all-stars, but it also should put this Warner Bros. Dreamscape" (1984) featured a man who could enter and manipulate dreams, and, of course, in "The Matrix" (1999) human beings and machines battled on various reality levels created by artificial intelligence. In "Inception," Nolan imagines a new kind of corporate espionage wherein a thief enters a person's brain during the dream state to steal ideas. This is done by an entire team of "extractors" who design the architecture of the dreams, forge identities within the dream and even pharmacologically help several people to share these dreams.