Shutter Island

I resigned myself years ago to the notion that Martin Scorsese, my favorite filmmaker since the age of 15, would probably never make another great movie. That hasn’t stopped him from making a series of really, really good films, the latest being the exuberant and disturbing asylum noir Shutter Island, based on the Dennis Lehane novel. Shutter Island was dumped from its Oscar-season release date into February by Paramount, leaving a pre-release black mark that many critic sheep mistook for a target. Leonardo DiCaprio does good work as Teddy Daniels, a paranoid U.S. marshal investigating a disappearance from the forbidding island asylum of Ashecliffe Hospital. Teddy’s involvement in the case is just an excuse to excavate a long-dormant murder case from his past, which the Ashecliffe staff and doctors appear to know more about than they admit.