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20Something TERRIBLE is afoot. Sadly, that something turns out to be the movie itself.
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100When was the last time you had to wait until the final sentence of a film to understand all the details? When was the last time you went to a genre movie – or what looked like one in spooky trailers – and realized the director had fulfilled that promise and meditated on his favorite topic? Shutter Island does just that.
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88The film's primary effect is on the senses. Everything is brought together into a disturbing foreshadow of dreadful secrets.
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63It’s not bad, but as Scorsese, America’s greatest living filmmaker and film history buff should know, even Hitchcock came up short on occasion.
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50Was it worth slogging through the nearly two hours of damned muddle to get to those last affecting moments? Not often in movies is the destination so much better than the journey.
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80DiCaprio delivers a startling prettyboy-to-tough nut makeover – but he has to play it close to his chest here for the storyline to play out. Once you get past the trickery, Shutter Island offers sumptuous, enthralling, shivery gothic filmmaking with a hardboiled heart and a sly line in asylum humour. If a pot is being boiled, at least it’s an intricately-decorated pot on a spectacular fire.
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70It's a pleasure to experience Scorsese as a circus master. One just hopes he doesn't continue in this vein.
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88DiCaprio, in his most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet, is the vessel Scorsese uses to lead us through the film’s labyrinth.
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75The tone and mood of Shutter Island are different on the screen from on the page -- the shadows darker than you imagined, the violence more ghastly, the blood redder.
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75Scorsese has great fun with a story that in the final analysis does not really demand to be taken any more seriously as history than "Inglourious Basterds."
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75A case can be made that the movie is so enamored with this aspect of its approach that it fails to connect on an emotional level. Shutter Island addresses some powerful, disturbing concepts but, despite effective performances by the leads, the movie's psychological impact is minimal.
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63There are many many fine performers here, including the terrific Patricia Clarkson as the elusive Rachel. But Shutter Island is not so much a character study as it is an atmospheric thriller.
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63Despite its flaws, Shutter Island is worth seeing for the palpably nightmarish and gothic world conceived by Scorsese
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63This is a long, heavy film, in which Scorsese’s aerobic moviemaking turns mannered and uncharacteristically passive.
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63This quasi-horror film has the great director's usual craftsmanship and a stellar cast, but ultimately it's an infuriating trick that makes its most provocative ideas disappear.
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63This gruesome thriller set in a fogbound insane asylum is incomprehensible and fatally flawed, but having said all of that, I will also say this: It never seems anything less than the work of a skillful film buff. Mr. Scorsese may be a smart aleck, but he’s a professional smart aleck.
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50It is less a film than a puny trampoline -- an occasion, though a grim one, for this most fervently movie-mad of American directors to show off his love for the various pulp genres mooshed together by the 2003 Dennis Lehane novel.
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38If Shutter Island, a gothic thriller starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo, were put to a free association test, the word most likely to come to mind would certainly be "weird."
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25Scorsese stuffs the film with heavy-handed art direction and piles on a ludicrously ominous soundtrack. The soundtrack is a constant reminder of the movie's importance and only highlights its unimportance.
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80It's not a great movie so much as it is great moviemaking. It's basically a potboiler genre film, a B-movie with big talent attached.
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70Shutter Island is a bear hug to cinema while it’s also an occasionally tart valentine to genre.
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60Shutter Island is slumming: minor but enjoyably nuts.
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40For all the trickiness and bluster, Shutter Island is dead inside.
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78It's pure Bedlam, but for genre fans, Scorsese makes it feel like coming home.
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83Atmospheric, absorbing and completely in the control of the man who made it -- unlike, especially, “Bringing Out the Dead,” which it sometimes resembles.
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75Shutter Island holds you, but it doesn't grip you. It's as if Scorsese had put his filmmaking fever on psychotropic drugs.
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90Martin Scorsese has created a divinely dark and devious brain tease of a movie in the best noir tradition with its smarter than you'd think cops, their tougher than you'd imagine cases to crack and enough nods to the classic genre for an all-night parlor game.
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Not since "Raging Bull" has Mr. Scorsese so brazenly married brutality to beauty. Not since "Kundun" has one of his films felt so aspirational.
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80Even when it's clear Scorsese has decided to employ fakery and allow it to be obvious, it's done with elegance and beauty.
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Since more attention has gone into filigreeing details into each scene than worrying about the way they'll fit together, the rattletrap engages you moment-to-moment, even as the overall pacing stops and lurches alarmingly.
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70No one is denying the energy and the dread that stalked the best B movies of the past, but, when the best director of the present revives such monsters, how can he hope to do better than a B-plus?
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70What Scorsese brings to the table, having created more than his share of rascally villains, is a renewed sense of horror and despair at the power of evil.
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50The ending is powerful..., but Shutter Island is a long slog.
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50Shutter Island is an aesthetically and at times intellectually exciting puzzle, but it's never emotionally involving.
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30Scorsese is pushing, I guess, for something that combines a '40s horror-thriller with a contemporary psychological tragedy. What he ends up with is more like a Hardy Boys mystery directed by David Lynch.
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91There’s a purpose to all this madness--though to talk about the primary reason the film succeeds would be giving the game away--but it should be appreciated first as a vivid, waking nightmare.
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50It comes on strong, but in its bloody heart of hearts it’s no more resonant than one of those old Vincent Price-Edgar Allan Poe contraptions – and less entertaining, too.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 151 out of 204
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Mixed: 20 out of 204
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Negative: 33 out of 204
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One of the most beautiful movies that I have seen. Di Caprio is fantastic in his interpretation, and the plot is very interesting, since at the end...