Nolan’s high-tech dream-set swindle Inception is too fastidiously plotted to be completely dream-like - there’s a clockwork meticulousness at work that makes this one of the least oneiric “dream” films ever made. But once you accept the internal logic of Nolan’s premise – artificially manufactured dream worlds where information can be extracted from and ideas can be inserted into – Inception makes for a breathless, kinetic puzzle-box thriller that deftly combines the baroque, blockbuster chops of his Batman films with the labyrinthine narratives of his breakthrough hit Memento and The Prestige. The ruse, involving Leo DiCaprio leading a team of specialists to plant an idea into the head of a wealthy industrialist, mushrooms into a mind-bending dream-within-a-dream-within-another-dream caper. Nolan’s setpieces are muscular, dynamic, ambitious in its parallel editing – bolstered in no small part by Hans Zimmer’s thunderously urgent score – but it also becomes occasionally exhausting by way of prolonged repetition. He can be faulted too for a certain dearth of imagination: aside from the nifty zero-gravity fight scene, there isn’t much of the potential hinted earlier on with the Folding City sequence and Ariadne’s maze drawing. Nevertheless, flawed as it is, Inception is a much-needed respite in a current cinematic landscape that’s dominated by remakes, adaptations and reboots.