Great

Rating: 10/10 (5 February 2019)

Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Dom Cobb, a specialist in the practice of 'extraction,' the vaguely criminal art of entering the dreams of a subject -- or of luring a subject into dreamscapes built to deceive -- and stealing secrets from his or her subconscious. Cobb practices his craft in the employ of corporations and governments and always on the lam; he's unable to return to his family in America because he's the prime suspect in a mysterious death.
A chance to exonerate himself and return home is offered him by a client (Ken Watanabe) who wants something far more difficult than simple extraction; he wants Cobb and his team to perform an 'inception' -- to plant an idea in a subject so that he embraces it as his own. But there's a problem: The target, industrial heir Robert Fischer Jr. (Cillian Murphy) has been trained in fighting off extractors; breaking into his innermost mind will thus be a physical fight (or, rather, a virtual physical fight) as much as a logical one.
It's not a job that Cobb can pull off alone. He has his perennial right-hand man, the sharp and crafty Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), aboard. He calls on an old colleague, the shady forger Eames (Tom Hardy). And he enlists new allies, a master of sleeping potions (Dileep Rao) and a brilliant puzzle-maker and instinctive mind-explorer named Ariadne (Ellen Page) who's given the job to build not one, not two but three labyrinthine dreamscapes through which Cobb can lead Fischer to an unguarded place where the inception can occur.
Sound tricky? Well, it's just the start: As Ariadne discovers, to her fear and horror, Cobb can't descend too deep into a dreamworld without encountering Mal (Marion Cotillard), his beloved wife and fellow extractor and the person whom he is suspected of killing. Diving into a target's subconscious brings Cobb perilously close to the most volatile and dangerous parts of his own. And as an inception requires him to go to profound depths, he can't bring it off without exposing himself to the thing that most terrifies and beguiles him in all the world.
So you've got an action picture with truly stupendous sequences in sometimes mind-bending settings, you've got an intellectual thriller in which achieving the goal means risking one's own sanity, and you've got a logical puzzle which, at some moments, is simultaneously five or more layers deep. (You've also got a nifty extended metaphor for the filmmaking process, with Cobb standing in for Nolan at the center of a creative group that's trying to trick people into thinking that their waking dreams are actual reality, but I'm saving that discussion for my Ph.D. thesis....)