There is no doubt that Nolan is a very talented director, and I like a lot of his films, but sadly I think like a number of other hugely successful directors before him (Peter Jackson springs to mind) his success has led to a detrimental degree of freedom for him to churn out his own poorly-written scripts unchecked, and make films that are about an hour longer than they need to be.

I know I'm swimming against the tide of public opinion here, but while I was hugely excited about seeing Inception back when it came out, I was absolutely crushed on first viewing. I found it terribly written (the film begins with enough exposition scenes to fill a normal film's running time!), incomprehensible (editing was all over the place, action dull and repetitive), visually disappointing (all the best bits were revealed in the trailer and were all contained in the exposition scenes rather than having anything to do with the story) and with a concept that just didn't hold water (the dream sequences seemed to always resemble Matrix out-takes and were held together by a logic that just wasn't very dream-like)!

Perhaps if Nolan had a studio breathing down his neck and someone to revise his shaky script this could have turned out well, but after the success of TDK he can effectively write his own ticket and is (sadly) free to churn out this kind of lazy and self-indulgent snooze-fest. The same thing happened with Peter Jackson after LOTR with King Kong (an hour too long, too much freedom etc.)

Hans Zimmer's incredible score was about the only positive I took out of Inception (Zimmer's brilliant scores are increasingly the glue that holds Nolan's films together and makes them seem better than they are). Despite his obvious talents and love of film (I love him for shooting Batman stuff in IMAX 70mm!) Nolan has some very bad habits (mainly relying on his and his brother's writing) which I think really hamper his films these days. I loved TDK, but it frustrates me in almost equal measure, and though I haven't seen The Dark Knight Rises yet, I will go in with very low expectations based on his apparently dwindling form.