Is all that we see or seem...

I've never subscribed to the auteur theory of film direction - that the director is the author of a film and all his work reflects his creative vision - after all, John Huston directed both The Maltese Falcon and Escape to Victory and there are countless other examples of individual directors making films of wildly varying quality. M Night Shyamalan for instance seems to have made a career out of disappointing people after his one decent film.

However, British director Christopher Nolan has, over a relatively short period, produced a remarkably consistent resume which includes Memento, The Prestige (a film I have raved about for some time but which no one else seems to have seen) and The Dark Knight; three of the best films of the last decade. His latest is Inception, the biggest budget art movie you'll ever see and the most intelligent science fiction films in years.

Leo Di Caprio, an actor who it has to conceded can carry a movie, is Cobb, a master of dreams who is hired to implant an idea in a businessman's head. That's the basic plot, but such are its convolutions that at one point in the film we find ourselves watching a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream. That is Inception's greatest strength, that the audience has to concentrate throughout or risk losing the thread entirely. How many Hollywood blockbusters can that be said about?

If the film has a flaw though, it's that it is almost entirely an experience of the mind and of the eye. There is little heart to it. The supporting cast is superb, yet their characters are mostly undeveloped and only at the end do we really care what happens to the protagonist. Is Inception a brilliant film? Yes, probably. Did I love it? I'm not sure. But to see a film that rises so far above mediocrity is such a rarity these days that one shouldn't be churlish. 10/10.