I won't, and can't, pretend that I understand every single thing that happens in Inception, Christopher Nolan's cerebral, hard-charging thriller about dream thieves, regret and the physics of the mind. It's a dizzying bombardment of ideas and shrapnel, of advanced psychology and gunpowder; a sci-fi heist picture that connects on an intellectual level as well as a visceral one. If Carl Jung wrote an action-adventure blockbuster after watching a Total Recall/The Matrix double feature, this is what it would look like.

Leonardo DiCaprio (intense and stressed out, as always) plays Dom Cobb, an expatriate who works illegally as an "extractor", essentially a high-tech thief with the ability to enter the mind of a person while they're sleeping and pluck out a vital secret hidden within their brain. This is a rare and useful talent, especially when shady businesses are looking to ruin their competitors and are willing to pay anything for the job. What Cobb needs isn't money, however - he seems to have a limitless supply of it. What he needs is to get back to the US, where he's a wanted criminal. He needs to see his children again.

This is made possible when he's approached by the supremely wealthy Saito (Ken Watanabe), a crafty businessman whose intention it is to break up a rival energy firm, whose patriarch has just died and is now in the hands of the man's grieving son, Robert (Cillian Murphy). Saito's pitch: Convince Robert that he needs to break up the business, a proposition that requires not the theft of an idea, but the planting of one - a near-impossible process called "Inception" - and Cobb's persona non grata status in the states will be expunged.