Following - 1998 - 4 Stars

Actors:  Jeremy Theobald, Alex Haw
Director:  Christopher Nolan

Note: Minor spoilers for this film and Inception

It's very easy to read the first film in Christopher Nolan's career in terms of all the ones that have come after, and certainly  thematically it's all here.  It's perhaps even easier to compare Nolan to Hitchcock only that Nolan's characters reside a more solipsistic world, and that more than Hitchcock, Nolan uses our knowledge of conventional film plotting against us.  Easier still is to read this as a meta-film whereby the protagonist, obsessed with 'following strangers', is a man just looking for the same thrills that a film would provide, and he is provided with them by a 'director'.  Nothing annoyed me more about Inception that the trite revelation that at bottom, it's about the experience of going to a movie theater - I know what that's like, I've done it quite a lot, I go to the movies to see past my own navel, engrossing though it is.

But let's can all that rot - Following is a great little Rube Goldberg of a film.  Had I known nothing about Nolan, the second half of the film would have caught me more by surprise, but the way it all turns out is quite surprising nonetheless.  It's tempting to dismiss Nolan's later films as mere reworkings of this plot, and indeed, having seen 4 of his movies, I am now bearish on his future as a maker of great films.  Still, even if he keeps making the same movie over with more bells and whistles, it figures to (maybe) be interesting.