Inception

Inception (2010) came out of a screenplay Nolan worked on for roughly ten years, and its setup fits in a sentence: you can enter a dream and steal an idea. The job in the film is the reverse, leaving one behind. Cobb does corporate espionage, entering a target's subconscious to extract information. He is offered a task considered impossible: plant an idea in a man's mind that he will believe is his own. In return he can go home. The layered structure is functional rather than decorative. Time runs at a different speed on each level of the dream, so a second above is minutes below. That is why a van falling on one level requires a corridor to rotate on the level beneath it. That corridor was not made on a computer. A rotating set was built and Joseph Gordon-Levitt fought inside an actual spinning tube. There is something hidden in the music. The track the teams use to wake each other is Édith Piaf's Non, je ne regrette rien, and the two note brass motif heard throughout Zimmer's score comes directly from her 1960 recording. Zimmer says he did not slow the song down but extracted and manipulated two notes out of it. The score had been announcing the film's rule from the start. The spinning top at the end has been argued about for fifteen years. It runs 148 minutes. Good for: science fiction, heist films, and structural puzzles. Less good for: the rules are explained constantly, which some viewers experience as a lecture. There is gun violence.