This review is, for the most part, free of spoilers, but if you want to go into the movie as a complete blank slate, you may not want to read it.

Christopher Nolan is becoming something of a slam dunk in Hollywood terms. There are few directors, probably less than you can count on one hand, who have a track record of creating a string of movies that are both critical and commercial successes with no flops in between. But Nolan is so far batting about as near a thousand as anyone could ever dream of. Hell, just look at his track record.

Start with his little known and surprisingly good debut which was seen by probably a handful of people but enjoyed fruitful DVD sales after more people began to become aware of his film making skill; Following debuted in 1998 as underground as any debut movie and currently holds an 80 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 7.6 on IMDB. The next movie would be Nolan’s calling card, Memento, the famous “movie that goes backwards,” 93 at RT and 8.6 at IMDB. It only gets better from there. Insomnia, a remake of a foreign film has a 92 and 7.2 rating. Batman Begins is 85 and 8.3. The Prestige is criminally underrated by RT at 75 but IMDB was more kind with an 8.4. And The Dark Knight, which received heavy coverage due to the death of star Ledger, sits at a 93 and 8.9. And he continues to improve.

Nolan’s newest offering, Inception, is something of a return to his earlier days of Memento and Following. Like those earlier movies, he is writer, producer, and director, so this is his baby all the way through. And like those earlier movies, this one likes to manipulate the way a story can be told by manipulating how time passes in it. In Following we had three separate threads of the same story moving all at once. Each of this threads was about the same character, but at different times in his tale. Memento told the story of a character who could not make new memories and artfully simulated his frustrating experiences by having each segment of story occur chronologically before the previous one.

What Inception does is wholly different. Without delving too much into a ‘laws’ of the movie’s reality, the story involves a team of highly skilled dream manipulators. Normally, they use these skills to illegally steal information from peoples’ subconscious for a fee. For the majority of the movie, they are instead trying to implant and idea into the mind of an unsuspecting CEO to manipulate how he will run his company. We are told quite simply that this is something that is considered to be impossible by most, and we are told convincingly and believably. However, the team accepts the job and they plan to accomplish it by taking the target into a dream…within a dream…within a dream. Sound confusing? It gets better. Within each level of dream, time passes more slowly. By the time they are down three levels, the difference is drastic. While five seconds may pass in the real world, that’s a few hours one level down, a week two levels down, and months three levels down.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “this seems hard to follow,” then that may be the one thing that can keep you from enjoying this movie. It does, without question, require your full attention throughout to keep up with what’s happening. It’s not challenging really if you are paying attention, but blink and you might get lost. Fortunately, there is little about this movie that will do anything but keep you glued to the screen.

It should go without saying if you’ve seen any of Nolan’s other films or even simply read the scores above that the writing and directing are superb. Thankfully, so is the acting. Leonardo DiCaprio carries the film as the principal character, an American who cannot return to his home country to see his kids because of something in his past that resulted in him being a fugitive. He still speaks with them on the phone occasionally, but he longs to return home. In the mean time, he performs extractions overseas as mercenary. He and his team go into peoples’ dreams and attempt to steal confidential information from their subconscious. His closest partner is portrayed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, an actor who will surely be offered a dozen roles after this performance.

Ken Watanabe portrays DiCaprio and his team’s first mark, one which they fail to extract from. Watanabe’s character returns to offer DiCaprio and his team a new job, the titular inception, in return for which he will use his considerable power to remove DiCaprio’s criminal record and allow him to return home. DiCaprio naturally accepts, and he and Levitt commence building their new team. Each member of the team has a “role” that alludes to their specialty in the dream world. DiCaprio is the extractor and Levitt the point man. Ellen Page is recruited from a local architectural school to be the architect, the person who creates the physical features of the dream world, allowing the mark’s subconscious to populate it. English actor Tom Hardy joins the team as the forger, a man capable of assuming the appearance of someone else in their dream. Dileep Rao rounds out the team as their chemist, the man responsible for creating the drug cocktail to keep all of them asleep long enough to create the multi-tiered dream world. Watanabe accompanies all of them into the dream as well, wanting to see first hand that his job is completed. The mark is played by Cillian Murphy. Minor characters are played by Marion Cotillard, Tom Berenger and Michael Caine. I had a few problems with Watanabe’s accent on some of his lines, but otherwise I cannot complain. If they gave an Oscar for best overall performance by an entire cast, this movie would be a shoe-in to win it this year. Everyone was spot on.

The plot progression is just complex enough to be challenging without being impenetrable. The skeleton of the story is the team’s attempt to plant an idea in their mark’s head, and this is juxtaposed with DiCaprio’s character’s personal struggles. All of this creates a wonderful canvas for Nolan to fill with his not-too-serious philosophical questions. Oh, and there’s some pretty mind bending special effects in there too. Not really something we haven’t seen before in a technical sense, but like the Matrix ten years ago, it’s the manner in which old methods of special effects are used to create new and thrilling set pieces that impresses. The movie mixes in a good bit of action here and there. Some of the more entertaining scenes include a fight scene in the hallway of a building that seems to be spinning in which the combatants move spider-like across all surfaces. There are city streets that bend and fold over each other, massive sky scrapers that crumble into the ocean, and whenever a dream is coming to an end, the entire world seems to collapse in on itself. It’s not that fake realities are original in movies, but the concept is certainly handled with great originality here, and the effects go a long way in selling that message of originality.

There’s a lot more I would like to say, but doing so would take away from the fun. Part of the enjoyment of this movie will come from seeing it without knowing too much, trying to keep pace on your own and wondering what will happen next. I will say only one last thing; in a movie such as this, it would have been almost too easy to throw in a nonsensical dream twist at the very end just for the sake of doing it. While Nolan wisely leaves the audience a little curious as to whether or not the film concludes in the real world, it’s done very subtly as opposed to via blunt force trauma, and as such what could have been a bitter aftertaste is avoided. The movie, for all it’s complexity, is more or less exactly what it claims to be, and that is a bit refreshing after what seems like a decade long period of thrillers that all have twists, and not only twists but the same obvious twist. If nothing else, this movie gets my thumbs up for not doing that. If you want the twist, it’s there for you. If you don’t, then it’s not.

You will like this movie if: You like any of the main actors in it, you like a movie that makes you think, you like cool special effects, you like a movie that actual has some substance to it, you are fascinated by the concept of dreams, and you can keep up with a movie that doesn’t just drop itself in your lap like a ton of bricks.

You will not like this movie if: I don’t know, I’m sure someone will find a reason not to like it. I guess maybe you could just really hate someone on the cast or maybe you just went in to it expecting something else. I think it would be very hard to dislike this movie for most people.