ABOUT THE MOVIE ABOUT THE MOVIE Shutter Island * * 1/2 out of four Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Emily Mortimer, Max von Sydow, Patricia Clarkson, Michelle Williams 
 
 Director: Martin Scorsese 
 
 Distributor: Paramount Pictures 
 
 Rating: R for disturbing violent content, language and some nudity 
 
 Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes 
 
 Opens Friday nationwide From the first queasy scene, you are drawn into and captured by the ominous goings-on at Shutter Island. As his audience squirms, he's in movie heaven.From the opening music chords, supervised by Robbie Robertson from existing source material, a sense of doom settles over the film's characters. In 1954, two U.S. marshals -- Teddy (Scorsese's go-to star, Leonardo DiCaprio) and his new partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo) -- watch the forbidding fortress that is Shutter Island loom larger and larger as their ferry approaches the island's only dock.In quick order, exposition rolls off the actors' tongues, like in those B-movies that lasted only 70 minutes. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Teddy Daniels, a federal marshal who arrives, seasick, at Shutter Island, an isolated hospital for the criminally insane, to try to find a missing woman institutionalized there after she drowned her three children. Teddy, like Cawley, is mystified as to how the woman could have gone missing, since the hospital is so tightly - and creepily - guarded. A storm and hurricane figure into the story; at times you'll want to reach for a raincoat. During daytime, Teddy experiences flashbacks and the presence of the dead, especially his late wife (Michelle Williams) and a little girl from the camp who asks, "Why didn't you save me? Once on the island, they're subjected to the rules of the place: No weapons, and everyone defers to Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley), the psychiatrist who more or less runs the place. He presents the marshals with their case: the mind-boggling escape of a delusional killer (Emily Mortimer). With Dante Ferretti designing his sets and Robert Richardson behind the camera, Scorsese certainly has the right playmates. One just hopes he doesn't continue in this vein.
– Martin Scorsese has crafted a gripping '50s-era thrill ride in Shutter Island, which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo as federal marshals probing a disappearance at a hospital for the criminally insane, say critics. The movie is a "nerve-twisting, tension-jammed exercise in pure paranoia—and possibly Scorsese's most commercial film yet," writes Kirk Honeycutt at the Hollywood Reporter. Shutter Island is "basically a potboiler genre film, a B-movie with big talent attached," Bill Goodykoontz writes at the Arizona Republic, but Scorsese's "care, love and astounding skill" give it staying power. DiCaprio turns in his "most haunting and emotionally complex performance yet" as Scorsese "holds us in a vise-like grip," writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. The movie has plenty of flaws, including too many meandering flashbacks, but it's "worth seeing for the palpably nightmarish and gothic world conceived by Scorsese," writes Claudia Puig at USA Today.