Inception

Whatever else Inception is or isn't, it's superb Big Screen entertainment. This is the sort of action-thriller for which cinemas are built. It's a sci-fi fantasy that plays with its audience's minds for around 150 minutes, letting them kid themselves that it would last ten years or an eternity in the third level of dreams.

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, this is a cross between The Matrix, Rubik's Cube and Mission: Impossible. It's also a multi-million dollar development of his Memento thriller. This time round, a man's memories are parts of his multi-dimensional dreams.

Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh from a similar mind-blowing role in Shutter Island, is totally credible as the ace dream extractor employed by a Japanese tycoon (Ken Letters from Iwo Jima Watanabe) to insert an idea into the mind of a business rival (Cillian Dark Knight Murphy). He accepts the job in return for the chance to re-enter the USA where he's charged with killing his fellow-mind-invader wife (Marian Piaf Cotillard). To complete the mission, he needs a dream architect (Ellen X-Men 3, Juno Page), a pair of trusted assistants (Joseph 3rd Rock Gordon-Levitt, Tom Bronson Hardy) and a master alchemist (Dileep Avatar Rao).

With that line-up of first-rate acting talent (and Berenger, Postlethwaite, Caine, Haas in small cameo roles), Nolan ensured that his dialogue would also be credible. His leaping, ricocheting editing of high-octane action choreography and SFX is highlit by the reliable music of Hans Zimmer, and Brit Nolan's visions are cinematographed as brilliantly as ever by the director of photography for all his movies since Memento (2000), American Wally Pfister.

As there should be in classic heist movies (or for an inverted heist in this case), the scenario must be leavened with a few in-jokes. The most noticeable aurally is the musical motif that will switch the team back from a dream state: it's an Edith Piaf song. There are visual quotations too, I'm sure, from movies and the real world, awaiting discovery during further viewings.

The film is possibly too long, extended beyond a mind's welcome, due to frantic efforts to try and tie up loose ends and rescue all characters from dream limbos or living death. The final shot is a devilish cliffhanging cop-out. The whole scenario is surely too complex to make sense during film-goers' immediate post-movie analysis, because it's ended up operating on three or more levels, in a car chase, epic gun battle, solitary couple's empty metropolis, various people's minds, memories and varying realities.

At the time, that's part of the fun of a successful movie conjuring trick, taking its audience on a wild ride into suspended belief. When Nolan's vehicle slows down for its melodramatic denouements, only then are his crafty mechanics visible, and his directorial desire to create more than just a blockbusting summer action-thriller admirably clear.