A major snow job from fair-haired filmmaker Christopher Nolan, nominally a science-fiction thriller focussed on some sort of psychic superspy (Leonardo DiCaprio, fully earning the furrow between his brows), an expert in the gentle art of “extraction,” the stealing of conscious ideas from people when their guard is down in dreamland, now assigned the more difficult task of “inception,” the planting of an idea in that same vulnerable state. Even for science fiction, the mumbo-jumbo to explain how all this works is exceptionally skimpy and unscientific; and the headlong propulsion of the plot, a vessel of commotion rather than of cogitation, allows no time for the mumbo-jumbo to sink in. The axiom that would seem to apply, the axiom that would seem to have been mislaid, is that if an artist is going to do something so “original” — as opposed to something as well-worn and easily understood as a time machine or a teleportation device — he must take care to instruct, to lay out the rules and regulations, to show the viewer the ropes. Else it’s wildest whimsy, freest fancy. It might just be possible that if the viewer were to sit through this a second or third time, he might better come to know what’s what. But a bloated running time of two and a half hours rather discourages that. On a first go-round, he’s apt to find that the dream state decreases any caper-film tension and reduces the goings-on to mere spectacle. You just sit and watch. You don’t worry. You don’t care. And under the influence of the key piece of strategy from Nolan’s The Dark Knight, namely Hans Zimmer’s unrelenting grinding throbbing pounding music, you might crave either an aspirin or an antidepressant. Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ellen Page, Marion Cotillard. (2010) — Duncan Shepherd