Inception
My son’s Christopher Nolan phase continues with this sci-fi/action/thriller from 2010 that gave us a famous Hans Zimmer sound effect, a couple of Leonardo DiCaprio memes, and the most famous spinning top in movie history. (OK, maybe that’s a little snarky.) My son loved Inception and found it pretty mind-blowing but I’m sad to say I found it a bit… underwhelming after all these years. There’s no denying its technical brilliance — it totally deserved that “Best Visual Effects” Oscar — but the storyline’s sense of ambition robs it of a lot of humanity. I appreciate and admire Inception for its technical brilliance — the hallway sequence with Joseph Gordon-Levitt is never not awesome — but as a narrative, it’s far more concerned with mind-bending ideas at the expense of everything else. Tenet does a much better job, I think, of managing ambitious high-concept storytelling with human emotion, due in large part to the relationship between John David Washington and Robert Pattinson.