Inception

Leonardo DiCaprio heads a team of industrial espionage agents who can enter a subject’s dreams to remove business secrets hidden in the subconscious. Their current assignment, though, isn’t to extract information but to plant an idea in the subject’s head, so deeply that he thinks it’s his own. Writer-director Christopher Nolan has produced a work of great art disguised as an action thriller, a thoughtful meditation on conscious reality and subconscious fantasy disguised as a con game carried out in dreams. So many movies let us slip our brains into cruise control that it’s startling to find one that won’t allow it, and Nolan forces us to be completely alert and observant; the result is emotional and intellectual exhilaration. Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Ken Watanabe and Cillian Murphy co-star. J.L.