"Shutter Island"

“Seen any walking nightmares lately, marshal?” a woman asks deputy marshal Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) late in director Martin Scorsese's "Shutter Island." She’s a psychiatrist, although she might as well be a psychic: Daniels has been prowling around the creepy corridors of the Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and he’s witnessed enough scary sights to fill a month’s worth of bad dreams.

It’s 1954, and psychiatric hospitals are not far from the dismal days of ice baths, crudely administered electro-shock treatments and other atrocities. In Ashecliffe’s Ward C, patients are still stripped naked and locked up in filthy, dark cells where their bodies rot and their minds deteriorate. The conditions in Ashecliffe’s other buildings are slightly better, although nobody’s going to mistake it for a country-club prison.

Adapted from Dennis Lehane’s novel, “Shutter” is a freak show with artsy pretensions.

Read the full review here.

"After Hours" (1985)

"After Hours" is a near-perfect black comedy from an unlikely source: Martin Scorsese, the director who's previously given us such rib-ticklers as "Raging Bull," "Mean Streets" and "Taxi Driver." In this satire of urban paranoia, Scorsese hits the right note from the very first scene and, with the help of a brilliant cast, accomplishes an exceptionally difficult task, creating a comedy that's both uproariously funny (often in a most uncomfortable way) and deeply disturbing at the same time.

Paul (Griffin Dunne) is a word-processor who lives alone in Manhattan. When he runs into an attractive, alluring blonde named Marcie (Rosanna Arquette) in a coffee shop, he decides to make a date and sets in motion the wheels that will ultimately crush him. During his harrowing journey to Marcie's Soho loft -- and the hair-raising trip back -- he runs afoul of almost every kind of disaster imaginable: lost money; heartless subway token vendors; militant gays who mistake him for a criminal; punkers who want to give him a Mohawk; nasty ice cream men; and even a ditzy cocktail waitress (beautifully played by Teri Garr in a sky-high beehive) who subjects Paul to her collection of Monkees records.

Dunne is wonderful as the quintessential schmuck and Arquette, in her fourth movie this year, sparkles as the tempting but twisted Marcie, whose constant confessions are hysterically bizarre. Michael Ballhaus' magnificent photography makes this a banquet for the eyes as well. "After Hours" is so relentlessly sardonic some people won't make it through to the end, but those who do will find this weird, jarring and often hilarious film is an experience they won't be able to shake off.