Christopher Nolan is very much flavour of the month, especially with Warner Bros, after the massive box-office success of THE DARK KNIGHT, which was overshadowed in the UK by MAMMA MIA of all things. It's interesting to see how his popularity has grown following the initial international success of his original film MEMENTO.

It is interesting because, up until his latest film, they have all been adaptations. INSOMNIA was a remake, BATMAN BEGINS and THE DARK KNIGHT were comic book adaptations and THE PRESTIGE was adapted from a book, although it was one of those rare cases that actually improved on the source material.

It certainly feels like he has been honing his skills with these movies and, visually and stylistically, INCEPTION is a long way from his first feature, FOLLOWING, which was shot in black and white 16mm on weekends over the course of a year.

However, this latest story bears a lot more resemblance to Nolan's two first films, because of their exploration of the fragility of the mind and its perceptions of the world.

Nolan said at the recent press conference in London that he started on the original concept of the movie ten years ago, but it wasn't until now that he felt he was ready to make it. Given the scope of the film he certainly wouldn't have been able to command the sort of budget to create the practical and digital sets nor visit the six international locations that were required to realise his vision, and it really is quite a vision he has created.

Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a thief, but not your average housebreaker or bank robber. Cobb's speciality is stealing secrets from deep within the subconscious of his targets by entering into their dreams, a process known as extraction. He and his team are so skilled that they are in great demand in the world of corporate and industrial espionage, but circumstances have left Cobb an international fugitive whose dream is to see the faces of his children again.

He is offered the chance to return to his old life by completing one last job, but this isn't stealing an idea, it's planting one. Known as inception, it is considered impossible, but Cobb is the only who can do it, and to achieve it he has to create a dream within a dream within a dream. However, Cobb's conscience isn't entirely clear, and therein lies the danger.

As any savvy filmgoer knows, the credibility of a movie comes from the suspension of disbelief – it's a movie so stuff that wouldn't normally happen can. When you're making a movie about dreams then that is implicit, in much the same way it is time-travel films. We all dream, whether we remember them or not, and weird stuff happens.

It's known as dream logic. In Nolan's world of espionage everybody seems to dream about guns and being chased by killers, but these dream worlds are created by an Architect, and the dream is shared through a machine so that the team can work together within the victim's subconscious. However, because it is the victim or target's dream, they do not have total control over what is happening in the dream and coupled with any psychosis from members of the team that can also manifest, the unexpected can happen and does at exactly the wrong (or dramatically right) moment – in a spectacular way.

Anyone hoping to find lots of surreal dream imagery is going to be a little disappointed, and will find more in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's or Michel Gondry's films. However, there is one scene in which Cobb introduces the new Architect Ariadne (Ellen Page) to the dream world, which allows Nolan to play with special effects and distorted perception, and to his credit he has done a lot of them with practical effects, although some are clearly CGI, such as the bending city. Nolan is very much an old school filmmaker, still preferring to shoot on film and build physical sets, rather than shoot digitally on a virtual lot. There are scenes later in the film where he literally throws his actors into a rotating room, giving the scenes a concrete reality within the dreamscape that would not be easy to replicate convincingly with CGI.

There is no denying this is a spectacular film, with amazing special effects and great performances from the cast. In a summer filled with vacuous popcorn movies, this is a sci-fi flick that is both exciting and intelligent. If anything that is one of the film's faults – it is a bit too cerebral, and for a movie about dreams, too logical. Nolan is, without doubt, a great filmmaker of almost technical perfection, but his films, and this one in particular, are a little dry, controlled and contrived, with a lack of a real emotional core. Even the love story between Cobb and his wife (Marion Cotillard) doesn't feel real: or maybe that too is part of the dream. In comparison with other movies showing at the same time, INCEPTION has amazing action set-pieces, but they are not a patch on the shameless, balls-out action of PREDATORS; the speculative science isn't quite as believable as that in SPLICE, which has the added advantage of not taking itself too seriously either; and it doesn't have the fantasy or emotional impact of TOY STORY 3.

Would I recommend it? Absolutely, especially in IMAX. Did it leave me excited and enthused in the way, say, KICK ASS did? Not at all, but it didn't make me feel sleepy either. And the ending: enigmatic or a cop out? See it and decide for yourself.

INCEPTION is in cinemas and IMAX from July 16.