Inception

Dream sequences within movies are all too common, and actually kind of naff. But how do you like dreams-within-dreams - or dreams-within-dreams-within-dreams? The human mind is a terrifying labyrinth, or at least Christopher Nolan's is, and the British-born filmmaker has followed up his gloomy and over-praised Dark Knight with something truly astonishing: a cerebral thriller that asks its audience to keep track of heart-racing action taking place on four planes of reality, simultaneously.

Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) works in ‘extractions', stealing secrets from corporate giants by appearing to them in their slumber. When Saito (Ken Watanabe) employs Cobb to go the opposite tack and implant a disastrous business idea in the mind of a rival (Cillian Murphy), the game's afoot and Cobb assembles a crack team of experts (including Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page and Bronson's Tom Hardy) to pull off the dreamland caper. What they don't count on is a malevolent figure from Cobb's unconscious (Marion Cotillard) turning up and pulling the rug from under their illusions.

Nolan has at last made a worthy successor to his mindbending Memento - a rip-roaring actioner that piles intellectual conceit upon intellectual conceit, yet remains remarkably lucid and straightforward. The multiple dreamscapes he brings to the screen include gasp-inducing CGI images, such as a city giving birth to its mirror twin. But even more uncanny is his use of real-world tricks like a fist-fight that takes place in a zero-gravity hotel corridor.

Nolan wields film narrative like a Mozart, a Descartes, or at least the smartest kid in the chess club. Inception may be two and half hours of car chases, gun fights and intrigue but, like Memento, it's also an inquiry into what we really know about life and what it truly means to ‘wake up'. Ladies and gents, the Oscar race has officially started and Inception is the one to beat.