Hello, Science!:
Thriller

The opening minutes of Anton Corbijn’s The American provide a near perfect taste as to the style and sensibilities of the movie that will follow. Against a backdrop of gorgeous scenery in an isolated European locale, a man commits an act of violence so sudden and detached that it seems as though it did not happen at all. The man (played by George Clooney) is a weary hit-man on the run from unknown pursuers who are hunting him for down for some previously committed deed. Fleeing to a small Italian village, our protagonist, now going by the name of Edward, befriends a local priest and beds a local prostitute, and is soon convinced by his shady employer to take one final job building a custom-designed rifle for another assassin. Despite doing almost nothing to escape the narrative pitfalls of the hit-man genre, The American is a film that still manages to stands out because of its refusal to descend into either cheap thrills or overstated melodrama, resulting in a quiet and restrained thriller with a deep undercurrent of yearning eroticism and unmistakable regret.

Fresh off the heels of the wildly successful and critically beloved superhero film The Dark Knight, British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan crafts a complicated, exciting, original and at times genuinely awe-inspiring science fiction thriller called Inception. Centred around a group of thieves who enter a man’s subconscious in order to plant an idea deep within the recesses of his mind, the movie deals with notions of reality and perception with an intelligence rarely seen in big budget action pictures, while at the same time more than delivering on all the thrills that mainstream audiences demand. Given that Nolan directed not one but two of my all times favourite films, it is fair to say that my expectations for Inception were fairly high; the fact that he was able to once again surpass everything I could have hoped for cements him as one of the most talented and ambitious minds working in the entertainment industry today.