movie reviews for inception

Dreams on top of dreams inside dreams

It’s said that Christopher Nolan spent ten years writing his screenplay for “Inception.” That must have involved prodigious concentration, like playing blindfold chess while walking a tight-wire. The film’s hero tests a young architect by challenging her to create a maze, and Nolan tests us with his own dazzling maze. We have to trust him that he can lead us through, because much of the time we’re lost and disoriented. Nolan must have rewritten this story time and again, finding that every change had a ripple effect down through the whole fabric.

The story can either be told in a few sentences, or not told at all. Here is a movie immune to spoilers: If you knew how it ended, that would tell you nothing unless you knew how it got there. And telling you how it got there would produce bafflement. The movie is all about process, about fighting our way through enveloping sheets of reality and dream, reality within dreams, dreams without reality. It’s a breathtaking juggling act, and Nolan may have considered his “ Memento ” (2000) a warm-up; he apparently started this screenplay while filming that one. It was the story of a man with short-term memory loss, and the story was told backwards.

Like the hero of that film, the viewer of “Inception” is adrift in time and experience. We can never even be quite sure what the relationship between dream time and real time is. The hero explains that you can never remember the beginning of a dream, and that dreams that seem to cover hours may only last a short time. Yes, but you don’t know that when you’re dreaming. And what if you’re inside another man’s dream? How does your dream time synch with his? What do you really know?

Cobb ( Leonardo DiCaprio ) is a corporate raider of the highest order. He infiltrates the minds of other men to steal their ideas. Now he is hired by a powerful billionaire to do the opposite: To introduce an idea into a rival’s mind, and do it so well he believes it is his own. This has never been done before; our minds are as alert to foreign ideas as our immune system is to pathogens. The rich man, named Saito ( Ken Watanabe ), makes him an offer he can’t refuse, an offer that would end Cobb’s forced exile from home and family.

Cobb assembles a team, and here the movie relies on the well-established procedures of all heist movies. We meet the people he will need to work with: Arthur ( Joseph Gordon-Levitt ), his longtime associate; Eames ( Tom Hardy ), a master at deception; Yusuf ( Dileep Rao ), a master chemist. And there is a new recruit, Ariadne ( Ellen Page ), a brilliant young architect who is a prodigy at creating spaces. Cobb also goes to touch base with his father-in-law Miles ( Michael Caine ), who knows what he does and how he does it. These days Michael Caine need only appear on a screen and we assume he’s wiser than any of the other characters. It’s a gift.

But wait. Why does Cobb need an architect to create spaces in dreams? He explains to her. Dreams have a shifting architecture, as we all know; where we seem to be has a way of shifting. Cobb’s assignment is the “inception” (or birth, or wellspring) of a new idea in the mind of another young billionaire, Robert Fischer Jr. ( Cillian Murphy ), heir to his father’s empire. Saito wants him to initiate ideas that will lead to the surrender of his rival’s corporation. Cobb needs Ariadne to create a deceptive maze-space in Fischer’s dreams so that (I think) new thoughts can slip in unperceived. Is it a coincidence that Ariadne is named for the woman in Greek mythology who helped Theseus escape from the Minotaur’s labyrinth?

Cobb tutors Ariadne on the world of dream infiltration, the art of controlling dreams and navigating them. Nolan uses this as a device for tutoring us as well. And also as the occasion for some of the movie’s astonishing special effects, which seemed senseless in the trailer but now fit right in. The most impressive to me takes place (or seems to) in Paris, where the city literally rolls back on itself like a roll of linoleum tile.

Protecting Fischer are any number of gun-wielding bodyguards, who may be working like the mental equivalent of antibodies; they seem alternatively real and figurative, but whichever they are, they lead to a great many gunfights, chase scenes and explosions, which is the way movies depict conflict these days. So skilled is Nolan that he actually got me involved in one of his chases, when I thought I was relatively immune to scenes that have become so standard. That was because I cared about who was chasing and being chased.

If you’ve seen any advertising at all for the film, you know that its architecture has a way of disregarding gravity. Buildings tilt. Streets coil. Characters float. This is all explained in the narrative. The movie is a perplexing labyrinth without a simple through-line, and is sure to inspire truly endless analysis on the web.

Nolan helps us with an emotional thread. The reason Cobb is motivated to risk the dangers of inception is because of grief and guilt involving his wife Mal ( Marion Cotillard ), and their two children. More I will not (in a way, cannot) say. Cotillard beautifully embodies the wife in an idealized way. Whether we are seeing Cobb’s memories or his dreams is difficult to say–even, literally, in the last shot. But she makes Mal function as an emotional magnet, and the love between the two provides an emotional constant in Cobb’s world, which is otherwise ceaselessly shifting.

“Inception” works for the viewer, in a way, like the world itself worked for Leonard, the hero of “Memento.” We are always in the Now. We have made some notes while getting Here, but we are not quite sure where Here is. Yet matters of life, death and the heart are involved–oh, and those multi-national corporations, of course. And Nolan doesn’t pause before using well-crafted scenes from spycraft or espionage, including a clever scheme on board a 747 (even explaining why it must be a 747).

The movies often seem to come from the recycling bin these days: Sequels, remakes, franchises. “Inception” does a difficult thing. It is wholly original, cut from new cloth, and yet structured with action movie basics so it feels like it makes more sense than (quite possibly) it does. I thought there was a hole in “Memento:” How does a man with short-term memory loss remember he has short-term memory loss? Maybe there’s a hole in “Inception” too, but I can’t find it. Christopher Nolan reinvented “ Batman .” This time he isn’t reinventing anything. Yet few directors will attempt to recycle “Inception.” I think when Nolan left the labyrinth, he threw away the map.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Michael Caine as Miles
• Cillian Murphy as Robert Fischer Jr.
• Tom Berenger as Browning
• Dileep Rao as Yusuf
• Marion Cotillard as Mal
• Ellen Page as Ariadne
• Leonardo DiCaprio as Cobb
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Arthur
• Tom Hardy as Eames
• Pete Postlethwaite as Maurice Fischer
• Ken Watanabe as Saito

Written and directed by

• Christopher Nolan

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Inception Reviews

Overall, “Inception” is a triumph, a perfectly oiled dream machine that can blow minds on first viewing and satisfy cinephiles on repeat viewings.

Full Review | Original Score: 9/10 | Apr 11, 2024

Nolan is exploring dreams and the possibilities are endless, which is why it’s a little disappointing that so much of the film feels like a generic CGI action movie, albeit a high-class one.

Full Review | Mar 20, 2024

It is, simply put, a cerebral masterpiece from Christopher Nolan. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Feb 7, 2024

As the corridor spins the characters as well as the audience have to grapple with the blurred boundaries between reality and the subconscious.

Full Review | Dec 11, 2023

There are thrillers, and then there are thrillers. Gripping every second and couching its pages of exposition in the smartest way possible, Inception is original filmmaking at its finest.

Full Review | Oct 17, 2023

"Inception" delivers twists that fit the evolving context of the story it's creating and commandingly wins your attention enough to not turn you off. While it may not seem like it, there is a point and a light at the end of the tunnel to this maze.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 4, 2023

This film must be revisited, talked about, analyzed, and rewatched again and again. It will surely grow upon each viewing, but it proves instantly enthralling the first time.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 18, 2023

Still one of the best original films of the last 25 years, Inception is a groundbreaking action drama with some of the most intricate plot mapping this side of dreams and reality.

Full Review | Jul 20, 2023

Fresh, innovative stories told in non-traditional ways...

Full Review | Apr 26, 2023

This is Christopher Nolan's insane, original concept...

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

[This] caper film that heists dreams instead of treasure is surely the most cerebral action thriller to become a blockbuster.

Full Review | Apr 8, 2023

Tech achievements duly noted (and their scale is certainly not nothing), I’m drawn back to Nolan’s 2001 fixation, unveiled to truly embarrassing effect in the dire, airless Inception...

Full Review | Jan 24, 2023

Confusing nightmare. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Oct 26, 2022

Inception’s inspiring imagination and ingenious innovation are still as staggering and stimulating today as they were ten years ago.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 1, 2022

...a modern cinematic masterpiece.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Aug 22, 2022

Blows up completely the notion of reality based on an extraordinary overlay of Borgian levels... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 21, 2022

Nolan's "dream within a dream" heist film, not only keeps you on the edge of your seat with incredible visual effects and memorable action set pieces, but also makes you a part of the puzzle-solving team from beginning to end. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 6, 2022

It's not nearly as confusing as many make it out to be, but if you do find yourself losing the plot a bit, remember you're at the movies and just let it overwhelm you. That's part of the fun.

Full Review | Sep 13, 2021

Inception engaged on a mainly intellectually level, but that isn't to say that film didn't pack an emotional impact.

Full Review | Jun 9, 2021

"They say we only use a fraction of our brain's potential" we are told in Inception. The same will never be said of Nolan.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | May 19, 2021

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‘inception’: film review.

In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes 'Inception,' easily the most original movie idea in ages.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes Inception , easily the most original movie idea in ages.

Now “original” doesn’t mean its chases, cliffhangers, shoot-outs, skullduggery and last-minute rescues. Movies have trafficked in those things forever. What’s new here is how writer-director Christopher Nolan repackages all this with a science-fiction concept that allows his characters to chase and shoot across multiple levels of reality. The Bottom Line In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes "Inception," easily the most original movie idea in ages.

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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. release near or at the top of the summer movies. It’s very hard to see how a film that plays so winningly to so many demographics would not be a worldwide hit.

Not that the film doesn’t have its antecedents. 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.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dom Cobb, a master extractor, who is for what initially are vague reasons on the run and cannot return home to his children in the States. Then along comes a powerful businessman, Saito (Ken Watanabe), who offers Dom his life back — if he’ll perform a special job.

Saito wants Dom to do the impossible: Instead of stealing an idea, he wants Dom to plant one, an idea that will cause the mark, Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), to break up his father’s multibillion-dollar corporation for “emotional” reasons.

Dom’s late wife, Mal (Marion Cotillard), haunts his own dreamworld like a kind of Mata Hari, intent on messing with his mind if not staking a claim to his very life. He doesn’t let on about this, but Dom’s new architect, Ariadne (Ellen Page), figures it out — which makes her realize how dangerous it is to share dreams with Dom.

A good deal of the first hour is spent, essentially, selling the audience on this sci-fi idea. As you witness an extraction that fails and then Dom’s recruitment of his new team around the world, the movie lays out all the hows, whys, whos and what-the-hells behind “extractions.”

If you don’t follow all this, join the club. It will perhaps take multiple viewings of these multiple dream states to extract all the logic and regulations. (At least that’s what the filmmakers hope.)

Something else might come more easily on subsequent viewings: With incredibly tense situations suspended across so many dreams within dreams, all that restless energy might induce a kind of reverse stress in audiences, producing not quite tedium, but you may want to shout, “C’mon, let’s get on with it.”

This is especially true when the hectic action in one dream, a van rolling down a hill with its dreamers aboard, causes a hotel corridor to roll in another, producing a weightless state in the characters. Even Fred Astaire didn’t dance on the ceiling as much as these guys do.

Page too displays sharp intelligence and determination in the face of this absolute jumble of reality. Especially surprising is Murphy as the mark; you find yourself genuinely sympathetic to a guy who just wanted to catch a little shut-eye and finds his mind kidnapped.

It also is nice that Nolan strives to keep CG effects to a minimum and do as many stunts in-camera as possible. This photo-realism certainly helps to keep the dream realities looking more plausible.

Credit cinematographer Wally Pfister with so neatly blending the real and surreal without any hokey moments. Ditto that for production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and the various stunt coordinators and effects teams. Meanwhile, editor Lee Smith does a Herculean job of juggling those different realities.

Sometimes originality comes at a cost though: At the end, you may find yourself utterly exhausted.

Opens: July 16 (Warner Bros.) Production: Warner Bros. Pictures presents in association with Legendary Pictures a Syncopy production Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Tom Hardy, Ken Watanabe, Dileep Rao, Cillian Murphy, Tom Berenger, Marion Cotillard, Pete Postlethwaite, Michael Caine, Lukas Haas Director-screenwriter: Christopher Nolan Producers: Emma Thomas, Christopher Nolan Executive producers: Chris Brigham, Thomas Tull Director of photography: Wally Pfister Production designer: Guy Hendrix Dyas Music: Hans Zimmer Costume designer: Jeffrey Kurland Special effects supervisor: Chris Courbould Visual effects supervisor: Paul Franklin Editor: Lee Smith Rated PG-13, 149 minutes

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Movie review: ‘Inception’

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Dreaming is life’s great solitary adventure. Whatever pleasures or terrors the dream state provides, we experience them alone or not at all.

But what if other people could literally invade our dreams, what if a technology existed that enabled interlopers to create and manipulate sleeping life with the goal of stealing our secret thoughts, or more unsettling still, implanting ideas in the deepest of subconscious states and making us believe they’re our own?

Welcome to the world of “Inception,” written and directed by the masterful Christopher Nolan, a tremendously exciting science-fiction thriller that’s as disturbing as it sounds. This is a popular entertainment with a knockout punch so intense and unnerving it’ll have you worrying if it’s safe to close your eyes at night.

Having come up with the idea when he was 16, Nolan wrote the first draft of “Inception” eight years ago and in the interim his great success with “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” not to mention the earlier “Memento,” put him in a position to cast Leonardo DiCaprio and six other Oscar-nominated actors and spend a reported $160 million in a most daring way.

For “Inception” is not only about the dream state, it often plays on screen in a dreamlike way, which means that it has the gift of being easier to follow than to explain. Specifics of the plot can be difficult to pin down, especially at first, and guessing moment to moment what will be happening next, or even if the characters are in a dream or in reality, is not always possible. But even while literal understanding can remain tantilizingly out of reach, you always intuitively understand what is going on and why.

Helping in that understanding, and one of the film’s most satisfying aspects, are its roots in old-fashioned genre entertainment, albeit genre amped up to warp speed. Besides its science-fiction theme, “Inception” also has strong film noir ties, easily recognizable elements like the femme fatale, doomed love and the protagonist’s fateful decision to take on “one last job.”

That would be DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb, a thief who specializes in what’s called extraction, in taking secrets from the subconscious. Aided by Arthur (a fine Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the trusted associate who is a whiz at the mechanics involved, Cobb is introduced in the middle of a dream involving Saito ( Ken Watanabe), a wealthy Japanese businessman.

That one last job is soon proposed by Saito, who asks Cobb if he is also able to do inception, the planting of ideas, a maneuver many people believe can’t be done. Saito promises Cobb, who has a past which prevents him from returning to his children in America, the one thing he can’t resist. If he takes on this one last job, if he agrees to practice inception on Robert Fischer ( Cillian Murphy), the heir to a multibillion-dollar energy empire, he will be able to return home.

In true movie fashion, Cobb has to round up a team to do the job. Aside from Arthur, he needs Eames, the forger (Tom Hardy), gifted at impersonating people inside dreams, and Yusuf, the chemist ( Dileep Rao), who makes the compounds that put people under. And with the aid of his father-in-law Miles ( Michael Caine), he meets Ariadne.

Named after the mythological character who helped Theseus find his way out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth, Ariadne is a young architect who is needed to create the subconscious landscapes in which the dreams will take place. As played by Ellen Page, adroitly cast for her youth, intelligence and earnestness, Ariadne is the team’s last essential element.

In addition to not knowing what they’ll find inside Fischer’s dream (believe me, there’s plenty going on), Cobb and his team have to contend with a wild card: Mal, the untrustworthy femme fatale, a woman with deep and complicated ties to Cobb’s past and someone who specializes in finding her way into dreams where she is not wanted.

The selection of Oscar-winning French actress Marion Cotillard as Mal typifies the care Nolan has taken to cast these thriller roles for emotional connection, a move which pays off in the scenes she shares with DiCaprio. In addition to the impeccably professional Batman veterans Caine and Murphy, the film is also on the money with the smaller roles, including Pete Postlethwaite as Fischer’s ailing tycoon father and Tom Berenger as one of his key associates.

The reason all these diverse elements successfully come together is Nolan’s meticulous grasp of the details necessary to achieve his bravura ambitions. A filmmaker so committed he does his own second unit direction, Nolan is one of the few people, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald on film mogul Monroe Stahr in “The Last Tycoon,” “able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads.”

Because he’s been so successful, Nolan, like Clint Eastwood, has been able to return again and again to the same creative team, which includes exceptional director of photography Wally Pfister, sharp-eyed editor Lee Smith and composer Hans Zimmer, whose propulsive score helps compel the action forward.

Incapable of making even standard exposition look ordinary, Nolan is especially strong in creating the stunts, effects and out-of-the-ordinary elements whose believability characterizes this film as they did his previous Batman efforts.

Shooting “Inception” in six countries, preferring to do elaborate stunts in camera whenever possible but expert at utilizing computer-generated effects when necessary, Nolan and his team (including production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas, special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, visual effects supervisor Paul Franklin and stunt coordinator Tom Struthers) have come up with some unforgettable set pieces. As detailed in a thorough cover story in American Cinematographer magazine, the standout imagery includes: a 60-foot-long freight train that barrels down the middle of a city street, shot in the vicinity of 7th and Spring in downtown L.A. with a replica of the train engine placed on the chassis of an 18-wheel tractor-trailer; a 100-foot hotel corridor built so it could rotate through 360 degrees to mimic a zero-gravity experience; and a mind-altering CGI scene that has a Paris street roll up and over itself like it was some kind of a tapestry instead of a steel and concrete boulevard.

His goal in doing all of this, Nolan told American Cinematographer, is a desire to always “be putting the audience into the experience,” to create “what I like to call a ‘tumbling forward’ quality, where you’re being pulled along into the action.”

Speaking of Paris, it’s one measure of how wide-ranging Nolan’s influences are that he used the classic Edith Piaf song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” as a key plot element. The pleasure of “Inception” is not that Nolan, as the song says, regrets nothing, it’s that he has forgotten nothing, expertly blending the best of traditional and modern filmmaking. If you’re searching for smart and nervy popular entertainment, this is what it looks like.

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Metacritic reviews

• 100 Boxoffice Magazine Pete Hammond Boxoffice Magazine Pete Hammond In terms of sheer originality, ambition and achievement, Inception is the movie of the summer, the movie of the year and the movie of our dreams.
• 100 Variety Justin Chang Variety Justin Chang If Inception is a metaphysical puzzle, it's also a metaphorical one: It's hard not to draw connections between Cobb's dream-weaving and Nolan's filmmaking -- an activity devoted to constructing a simulacrum of reality, intended to seduce us, mess with our heads and leave a lasting impression. Mission accomplished.
• 100 Empire Empire With physics-defying, thunderous action, heart-wringing emotion and an astonishing performance from DiCaprio, Nolan delivers another true original: welcome to an undiscovered country.
• 90 The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt In a summer of remakes, reboots and sequels comes Inception, easily the most original movie idea in ages.
• 88 Rolling Stone Peter Travers Rolling Stone Peter Travers In this wildly ingen­ious chess game, grandmaster Nolan plants ideas in our heads that disturb and dazzle. The result is a knockout. But be warned: Inception dreams big. How cool is that?
• 83 Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.
• 80 Time Out Joshua Rothkopf Time Out Joshua Rothkopf Inception, though, is no "Avatar"--instead, it’s the movie that many wanted "Avatar" to be. In a roaringly fast first hour, we’re introduced to a new technology that allows for the bodily invasion of another person’s dreamworld.
• 75 Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore Orlando Sentinel Roger Moore Inception is an elegant, portentous ride, though I’m not sure Nolan is any closer to visualizing the real (dream) deal than Hitchcock was.
• 40 New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein New York Magazine (Vulture) David Edelstein Inception manages to be clunky and confusing on four separate levels of reality.
• 30 Village Voice Nick Pinkerton Village Voice Nick Pinkerton It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams--and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.
• See all 42 reviews on Metacritic.com
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