Who's in it? Leonardo (Blood Diamond) DiCaprio, Joseph (500 Days of Summer) Gordon-Levitt, Ellen (Juno) Page, Cillian (The Dark Knight) Murphy.
What's it about? You have to see it to believe it.

Dom Cobb (DiCaprio) is a man with a secret.  He is a leader in corporate espionage, specialising in stealing information from victim's dreams, the process of "inception".  He and a team of young thieves are hired by businessman Saito (Ken Watanabe) to do the impossible, the opposite of inception, planting an idea so critical to the global economy that the billionaire pays with his soul to pull it off.  Cobb has a vested interest in this last job; the fate of his children, and the resolution of the murder of his wife.

What follows next is a tangled spider web with layers within layers, levels on top of levels and dreams that cross the line into reality and back with sometimes disastrous results - that is, for the players, not the audience.   These days movies are so full of fluff and flimsy dialogue, it's a cold slap in the face when a well-written, if a little convoluted script comes down the pipe. But it's not all high-brow, most notably in a hotel hallway scene that can only be described as an homage to the "Matrix" move on crack, which is a creative and technical masterpiece.  Inception easily ventures into the realm of "movies we need to see more than once" to fully understand the meaning behind the rapid-fire dialogue, multi-layered action and complex plot devices. 

The plot almost threatens to overshadow the actors save for Eames (Tom Hardy) who gives a very sly and underrated performance as one of the team's techies who are called in to help manoeuvre everyone through the maze of the dreamworld.  Hardy is going to blow up, big. Canadian actor Page (Ariadne), starts off promisingly as an egghead architect with a penchant for solving mysteries, but then her character devolves into a one-dimensional subconscious/harpy female stereotype that is usually the stuff of soap operas.  And sadly, top-billed DiCaprio plays yet another conflicted "damaged goods" character, the kind of acting that is done well, but any box office star could tackle just as easily.

One last tip, this is not the flick to walk in 10 minutes late or important information will be missed that is crucial to interpreting the remainder of the film.  And if your brain starts to throb halfway through the first act, don't say you weren't warned.

4 popcorns out of 5

Inception, now playing at the Caribbean Cinemas on Friars Hill Rd.  Click here for showtimes.