Shutter Island marks the fourth collaboration between director Martin Scorsese and star Leonardo DiCaprio, a teaming which has proven successful time and time again. The main question is, does their new film measure up with Gangs Of New York, The Aviator, and The Departed?
I once had the chance to introduce Martin Scorsese at a New York Film Critics Circle awards dinner (he was presenting an award) — and took the opportunity to say out loud that I felt fortunate that my career as a film critic coincided with Martin Scorsese's career as a filmmaker.
That sentiment still holds. Every film he makes is more than just food for thought — it's a full banquet. Scorsese is one of only a handful of directors working whose passion for the medium bleeds through in every frame. He forces the critic to bring out his A game — to watch and analyze the film with the same energy and imagination as the filmmaker brought to making it. And that's absolutely true of Shutter Island, his latest film…read more [The Huffington Post]
Leonardo DiCaprio (Teddy Daniels) and Michelle Williams (Dolores Chanal) in Shutter Island
“Shutter Island” starts working on us with the first musical notes under the Paramount logo's mountain, even before the film starts. They're ominous and doomy. So is the film. This is Martin Scorsese's evocation of the delicious shuddering fear we feel when horror movies are about something and don't release all the tension with action scenes.
In its own way it's a haunted house movie, or make that a haunted castle or fortress. Shutter Island, we're told, is a remote and craggy island off Boston, where a Civil War-era fort has been adapted as a prison for the criminally insane. We approach it by boat through lowering skies, and the feeling is something like the approach to King Kong's island: Looming in gloom from the sea, it fills the visitor with dread. To this island travel U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo)…read more [Roger Ebert]
Ben Kingsley as Dr. John Cawley, Leonardo DiCaprio as Teddy Daniels and Mark Ruffalo as Chuck Aule in Shutter Island
Shutter Island, a twisty gothic mental-asylum mystery set in 1954, primes you for some of that same triumphant Marty/Hollywood fusion. Adapting a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), Scorsese works in a smoothly deliberate pictorial mode reminiscent of the Hollywood noirs of the '50s, and for a while that style is classically enjoyable. Early on, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio), a U.S. marshal with narrowing eyes and a wary Boston edge, takes a ferry to Shutter Island, a rocky fortress off the coast of New England that houses a prison hospital for the criminally insane. The place is even more forbidding and isolated than Alcatraz, and with good reason: Nearly all of its 66 patients are violent psychopaths. Teddy is investigating the strange disappearance of one of them, Rachel Soldano, who drowned her three children. As he questions doctors and inmates, all under the ambiguous gaze of the institution's outwardly fastidious and liberal director (Ben Kingsley), it becomes clear that there's much more to this case than one vanished killer…read more [EW.com]
Martin Scorsese makes movies as if his life depends on it, never skimping on ferocity and feeling. From Mean Streets to The Departed, Scorsese's crime films turn the genre on its empty head, shaking out the clichés to uncover the violence of the mind. His latest, Shutter Island, sizzles with so much nerve-frying suspense that it's hot to the touch. The time is 1954. The place is Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, located off Boston Harbor on a remote island that's locked as tight as Alcatraz. A Category 5 hurricane is brewing as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his partner, Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo), ferry in to capture Rachel Solando, a killer of her own children who's escaped from her cell. The Gothic terror kicks in when the storm literally breaks down walls and the patients run amok, along with their darkest secrets. See it twice and double your fun. Just don't expect your head to stop spinning…read more [RollingStone]
brilliant film, saw it yesterday. the cinematography was fantastic and the cast was really strong!