Martin Scorsese back to ‘noir’ with Shutter Island

Two of this week's new films are based on best-selling thrillers. Martin Scorsese's Shutter Island has plot twists galore while The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is an intelligent Swedish whodunit. The question is, can either movie rival the original book?
 
Scorsese's Shutter Island - his 21st film - is based on Dennis Lehane's critically acclaimed psychological thriller of the same name. Two other Lehane novels, Mystic River and Gone, Baby, Gone have also been made into movies by Clint Eastwood and Ben Stiller respectively.
 
Shutter Island sees Scorsese visit the thriller genre for the first time since his gripping 1991 remake of Cape Fear (starring Robert de Niro) and most critics agree that the result is a tense and enthralling film.
 
Set in 1954, the story centres around US marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) who is dispatched to an asylum to investigate the disappearance of convicted murderer (Emily Mortimer) from her locked cell. Daniels quickly discovers that nothing on Shutter Island  is what it seems.
 
While it has faults - most notably a somewhat convoluted script - Shutter Island is visually spectacular, with the Los Angeles Times' Betsey Sharkey calling it "a new noir classic".
 
Indeed some reviewers think Scorsese's cinematic reworking of Shutter Island has surpassed the original book. The Wall Street Journal says its layers of meaning will "inspire doctoral dissertations" while Time Out's Tom Huddleston says Scorsese has taken a "berserk, meandering story" and turned it into his "most enjoyable film in a decade".

It is also boosted by a stellar cast that includes Ben Kingsley, Mark Ruffalo, Michelle Williams, Patricia Clarkson and Elias Koteas.
 
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is based on the first of a trilogy of international bestsellers by the late Swedish journalist Stieg Larsson. The original book has sold 10 million copies since it was published in 2005 and the film's box office takings stand at around $2.3 million in Scandanavia alone.
 
Larrson's two protagonists, Mikael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist), an investigative journalist, and Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a bisexual computer hacker, join forces to solve the long-ago murder of a young woman.
 
Danish director Niels Arden Oplev's take on Larrson's best-seller has had mixed reviews. Many critics feel the film lacks the depth of the novel. As Variety's Todd McCarthy argues: "The viewer gets a relatively faithful version of the novel's ingenious construction but only glimpses of its scathing portrait of Sweden as a corrupt, bankrupt and misogynistic society."
 
But, whatever the criticism, the film has undoubtedly launched a new female star in Noomi Rapace. Empire's Kim Newman, in a five-star review, calls the "unusual looking, intense" Rapace "the most influential female thriller lead since Jodie Foster's Clarice Starling". Four more movies, based on Larsson's second and third books from the trilogy, are already in the can.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING ABOUT...
 
'SHUTTER ISLAND':Philip French, the Observer:  “It is a film that, like Psycho (to which it inevitably nods at one point), we will need to revisit before making a proper assessment.”Jonathan Romney, Independent on Sunday: “Shutter Island, flawed as it is, is more audacious, challenging and downright entertaining than most Hollywood genre movies today. And many times more delirious.”Kate Muir, the Times: "There's not a moment's respite from the melodrama, in a film with so many red herrings that it needs a fishing quota." (3/5 stars)

'THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO':Cosmo Landesman,  the Sunday Times: "If only The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo provided the food for thought the novel gave us, it would be a far better film."Tom Huddlestone, Time Out: "For fans of Larsson's books this could be the highlight of the cinema-going year – for the rest of us it's a solid, enjoyable but emotionally unengaging detective story." (3/5 stars)

Nigel Andrews: the Financial Times: "Since the film lasts 150 minutes you set your mind to Zodiac mode and hope for the best. It is more stolid, more Swedish, but moves along cleverly." (3/5 stars)

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