MOVIES: Inception (Christopher Nolan, 2010)

A thinking man's popcorn movie.

By now, everyone's probably already seen it, or at least has some idea what it's about. Leonardo DiCaprio is the world's greatest "extractor," a thief who steals ideas from your mind by building dreamspaces. He's asked by a powerful tycoon (Ken Watanabe) to pull off the more difficult feat of inception -- planting a new idea in someone's mind. And so off goes Leo to assemble, as in Ocean's Eleven and every heist movie you've ever seen, the team of experts that can help him pull off this supposedly impossible feat.

It's a very good movie, but not the masterpiece that some are calling it. The wintry Bond-esque section of the movie drags on a bit too long, and it's not always precisely clear who's doing what, if only because everyone is dressed in virtually identical white snowsuits. And some of the set-up exposition in the first twenty minutes is less clear than it could be, mostly because Watanabe's accent is quite thick and sometimes difficult to understand.

Aside from those two relatively small problems, though, I have been perplexed by the number of people who say they find the story difficult to follow. Sure, there are multiple threads of dream/story taking place simultaneously, but Nolan does an impeccable job of differentiating them visually; whenever we cut from one level of dream to another, it's always instantly clear which level we're in. He's aided immensely by Lee Smith's editing, which is a spectacular tour de force, particularly in the last 45 minutes of the movie.

It's not a movie that calls for dizzying feats of acting, but the cast gives us some fine moments. Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Tom Hardy, as two of DiCaprio's team members, have a nice bickering rivalry; and Ellen Page, as the newest member of the team, is saddled with the thankless task of delivering lots of exposition, which she handles with more grace than you might expect. I was less impressed by Marion Cotillard, as the wife who haunts DiCaprio's dreams; I still don't find her a terribly convincing actress in English. (To be sure, there are reasons within the story for her character to be somewhat flat and two-dimensional, so maybe I'm being too harsh on her.)

And visually, the movie is stunning. The zero-gravity fight scenes, the origami folding of a Paris neighborhood onto itself, the crumbing cliffsides of DiCaprio's deepest subconscious -- gorgeous images. Throw in a top-notch Hans Zimmer score (occasionally blared at us much louder than it needs to be, but that's not his fault), and you've got a smart, thoughtful piece of entertainment that gives you all the thrills of a good summer popcorn flick without making you feel stupider for having sat through it.