Inception

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. 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.
Meanwhile, you meet the other team members -- Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), Dom's longtime point man; Eames (Tom Hardy), the forger; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), the chemist; and Dom's father-in-law (Michael Caine), who is not on the team but the professor who taught Dom to share dreams.
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."
f 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.
Probably what "sells" this tricky movie is the actors. In his second consecutive movie to question reality -- "Shutter Island" came earlier this year, remember -- DiCaprio anchors the film with a performance that is low-key yet intense despite hysterical chaos breaking out all around him.
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.
Roger Ebert review:
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.
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?
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.
"You're waiting for a train, a train that will take you far away. You know where you hope this train will take you, but you can't be sure. But it doesn't matter - because we'll be together."
Avec mes souvenirs
J'ai allumé le feu,
Mes chagrins, mes plaisirs,
Je n'ai plus besoin d'eux!
Balayé les amours
Avec leurs trémolos
Balayés pour toujours
Je repars à zéro...
Non... rien de rien...
Non... je ne regrette rien

Scenes of a sexual nature

Sex and love. Some seek it, some need it, some spurn it and some pay for it, but we're all involved in it. Set on one afternoon on Hampstead Heath, London, the film investigates the minutiae of seven couples. What makes us tick?