Inception Reviews
Top Critic'Inception': Chris Nolan's Brilliant Crackpot of a Movie
An astonishment, an engineering feat, and, finally, a folly.
It's only the latest indication that Christopher Nolan might be the slyest narrative tactician making movies today.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Pretty good, not bad, but brilliant it surely ain't.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Inception is a boldly constructed wonder with plenty of -- as one character describes it -- "paradoxical architecture."
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
I found myself admiring the movie's stubborn adherence to its own universe and logic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
Nolan, like Cobb, is an assiduous extractor, and he knows how to wow audiences. But scaling big and thinking big are not the same thing. And dark, just because it's dark, isn't more artistic than light.
Full Review
| Original Score: B
Like his protagonist, Nolan excels as an implanter of subversive ideas. This time, alas, he didn't dig quite deep enough for them to take root.
Inception is that rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels, a feat that uncannily mimics the mind-bending journey its protagonist takes.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
By convoluting the various planes of experience, by overlapping and obscuring ostensible realities and ostensible dreams, Mr. Nolan deprives us the opportunity of investing emotionally in any of it.
t has all of Nolan's strengths, and some of his weaknesses, and it is undeniably his. It is a $160 million action film about loss and regret, and it is exciting in part because of its flaws.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4.5/5
All it asks of viewers is that they do something rare: engage the intellect.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
The ambition on display is so huge, and the filmmaking so intelligent, you'll emerge feeling as if you've just watched an entire season of the greatest sci-fi series never made.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
This is a popular entertainment with a knockout punch so intense and unnerving it'll have you worrying if it's safe to close your eyes at night.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Nolan's film is surely the most ambitious psychological thriller ever, and yet also the most personal. His baroque imagination makes most directors' efforts look like beach-pail sand castles alongside Mad King Ludwig's Neuschwanstein Castle.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
With its James Bond-on-acid action scenes and puzzle-within-a-maze-within-a-puzzle mind games, Inception is certainly the most daring and original blockbuster of the year, as well as a visual tour de force. If it only had a heart.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Inception delivers dazzling special effects and a boatload of stars, but it sags and eventually buckles under the weight of its complicated premise.
Nolan is a thinker, all right, a very busy explorer of mind functions, but capable merely of diagrams when it comes to the heart and soul.
Mr. DiCaprio exercises impressive control in portraying a man on the verge of losing his grip, but Mr. Nolan has not, in the end, given Cobb a rich enough inner life to sustain the performance.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Like a dream, Nolan's film fades swiftly in the light -- but while it lasts, it feels like there's nothing more important to decipher.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The idea of moviegoing as communal dreaming is a century old. With Inception, viewers have a chance to see that notion get a state-of-the-art update. Take that chance: dream along with Christopher Nolan.
Inception may have been directed by Christopher Nolan, but Nolan's dreams are apparently directed by Michael Bay.
It's a long movie (2.5 hours) but doesn't feel so, and is the rare would-be blockbuster that demands close attention and would surely reward rewatching.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
With Inception, writer/director Christopher Nolan not only cements his status as Hollywood's most innovative filmmaker, he has created a daring genre: the surrealist heist thriller. Or, maybe he has developed the dream invasion action epic.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
At the end of Inception, I hadn't lived through the grueling emotional journey Nolan seemed to think I had, but I'd seen a bunch of cool images and admired some technically ambitious feats of filmmaking.
The dream logic of Inception -- which deals, like Nolan's far more intriguing Memento, with the architecture of memory and the nature of reality -- is stymied by a clunking script, crammed with expository exchanges and urgent blather.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2.5/4
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.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It's gratifying to experience a summer movie with large visual ambitions and with nothing more or less on its mind than (as Shakespeare said) a dream that hath no bottom.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
One of the best things about Nolan as a director is that he's not self-conscious. His movies unfold and fold in on themselves without the strain of labor or flash. But that lack of self-consciousness is also Nolan's downside.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
One of the most intoxicating, challenging and beautiful movies of the 21st century, deserving of multiple Oscar nominations.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
It's an affecting movie; quite a piece of art in a world of also-rans and marketing plans.
Full Review
| Original Score: A+
Inception is either a great, mind-bending movie or one big swindle. Let's go with the former.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
None of this prattling drivel adds up to one iota of cogent or convincing logic. You never know who anyone is, what their goals are, who they work for or what they're doing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
A sublime brain-twister of a movie that plays out so intricately on so many levels simultaneously that a bathroom break comes at your own peril.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
How can it be that a bunch of people sitting around scheming nonsense can prove so compelling? Only David Fincher knows how to take a studio's money and spin it as stylishly as Nolan.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Inception is an elegant, portentous ride, though I'm not sure Nolan is any closer to visualizing the real (dream) deal than Hitchcock was.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
It's obvious that Nolan either can't articulate or doesn't believe in a distinction between living feelings and dreams -- and his barren Inception doesn't capture much of either.
In this wildly ingenious chess game, grandmaster Nolan plants ideas in our heads that disturb and dazzle. The result is a knockout. But be warned: Inception dreams big.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
At first, Inception left me cold, feeling as if I'd just eavesdropped on somebody's bad acid trip. Now I find I can't get the film out of my mind, which is really the whole point of it, isn't it?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
One of the year's best films, one that will surely get even better upon repeated viewings.
As engrossing and logic-resistant as the state of dreaming it seeks to replicate, Christopher Nolan's audacious new creation demands further study to fully absorb the multiple, simultaneous stories Nolan finagles into one narrative experience.
Full Review
| Original Score: B+
I wanted to surrender to this dream; I didn't want to be out in the cold, alone. But I truly have no idea what so many people are raving about.
If movies are shared dreams, then Christopher Nolan is surely one of Hollywood's most inventive dreamers, given the evidence of his commandingly clever Inception.
A devilishly complicated, fiendishly enjoyable sci-fi voyage across a dreamscape that is thoroughly compelling.
