Inception Reviews: From Raves to Slams

Christopher Nolan's hotly anticipated movie Inception—starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Ellen Page, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt—elicited widely positive responses from critics. Ann Hornaday at The Washington Post wrote that "Inception is that rare film that can be enjoyed on superficial and progressively deeper levels, a feat that uncannily mimics the mind-bending journey its protagonist takes." Peter Travers at Rolling Stone called it "the mind-blowing movie event of the summer," one that "rewards the attention it demands." But the dissenters found it shallow, while praising its visual style. A.O. Scott at The New York Times writes "The accomplishments of Inception are mainly technical...though there is a lot to see in Inception, there is nothing that counts as genuine vision." Rex Reed at The New York Observer went even further, calling the picture an "assault on rational coherence" that "is the kind of pretentious perplexity in which one or two reels could be mischievously transposed, or even projected backward, and nobody would know the difference."