In Theaters:
Shutter Island
For all Martin Scorsese’s delighted use of pulp tropes in the gangster films that made him a household name, those films were always a breed apart, energized more by his personal vision and the electricity being tossed off by his leading men than his impressive internal library of cinematic memories. Even with their cinema-drunk panache, Goodfellas and Mean Streets were ultimately beholden to few other filmmakers. What it came down to was that Scorsese had never knocked out a real genre picture, something that people could go see with some friends on a weekend night for a good scare. So it was that Scorsese took Dennis Lehane’s B-flick-inspired novel Shutter Island and made a real monster of a film…
Shutter Island opens wide today, after being delayed several months by Paramount (which decided to put its Oscar campaign money behind The Lovely Bones). Read the full review at Short Ends & Leader.
