Once upon a time Martin Scorsese made fabulous movies like Raging Bull and Taxi Driver, now he’s switched genres to make a psychological thriller and he’s lost his fabulousness in the process.

Based on the novel by Dennis Lehane and set in the 1950s, Shutter Island focuses on the efforts of two federal marshals, Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), who are trying to track down a missing psychiatric patient (Emily Mortimer) from an apparently secure facility.

The island is situated miles off the Boston coast and can only be accessed by ferry, while the psychiatric hospital itself is surrounded by electrified fences and is heavily guarded, so how could a patient simply disappear? Teddy is suspicious from the outset and believes the chief medical officer, Dr Cawley (Ben Kingsley), may be conducting illegal experiments on his patients. As Teddy digs deeper and the weather conditions on the island worsen he is forced to confront his own fears and anxieties, realising what he believes to be the truth is simply an illusion, while nightmares from his own past return to torment him.

While a hurricane rages over the island, Scorsese tries to ratchet up the sense of paranoia and impending doom with flickering lights, gloomy barred cells and strident music, but the one thing the film absolutely fails to do is to instill any sense of fear or trepidation in the viewer.

This is a thriller without thrills, a film with twists so blatant they come as no surprise and a conclusion that will leave you unconvinced and unimpressed. In fact, it’s all rather damp and depressing and downbeat.

It is only in flashback scenes of Teddy’s experiences in the war and with his family that Scorsese’s talent of old flickers into life, only to die back again as we return to the present.

Almost unheard of here, in the States it is the theatrical equivalent of a favourite old jumper. The show, with book and lyrics by Tom Jones (no, not that one) and music by Harvey Schmidt opened off Broadway in 1960 and ran for 42 years, before reopening in New York in 2006, where it is still going strong.

Read the rest of the review on Show and Stay.

Lily and Marshall are settling into married life, and the series boasts guest appearances from a whole host of stars, including Britney Spears, Mandy Moore and Heidi Klum.

Click the DVD cover for an exclusive How I Met Your Mother clip.

Even more exciting than an exclusive clip, however, is our competition to give away five copies of the new series on DVD.

To win, just answer this simple question:

Which actress plays newsreader Robin Scherbatsky?

To enter, send your answers to competitions@the-void.co.uk by noon on June 11, 2010.

Good luck!

However, like so many follow-on films it suffers from sequelitis – everything has to be bigger, brassier and louder than the first film, but in the process the plot gets rather overlooked.

We return to find the fabulous Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr) revelling in his Iron Man persona and milking the crowd for all he can get at the Stark Science Expo, an opportunity for him to show off his impressive hardware even while he’s being investigated for un-American activities (he won’t give his special Iron Man suit or its secrets over to the military). But a few uppity politicians are the least of Stark’s worries, over in Russia, another physicist (Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko) is fast nearing completion on building a suit of his own and with it he plans to take Stark out. That’s if Stark actually lives long enough to do battle with him because the substance that powers Starks body and suit is actually poisoning him and if he doesn’t find an alternative form of energy soon he’ll be fried.

Then there’s his arch-rival (played with great glee by Sam Rockwell) who is just dying to see Stark take a fall (and mop up all the lucrative military hardware contracts in his absence). On top of all this his ever-loyal assistant Pepper (Gwyneth Paltrow) is getting over-protective, while a new aide, Natalie, (a very sultry Scarlett Johansson) is about to demonstrate she’s anything but idle eye candy.

So, that’s the plot sorted, let’s dive into the action and there are some pretty impressive sequences here including a classic car race in Monaco, Natalie single-handedly taking out a team of hired heavies and Stark and his buddy Lt. Col. Rhodes (Don Cheadle) squaring up against a whole squadron of Iron Man clones. Director Jon Favreau handles all this with aplomb, it’s just the bits in between that drag slightly, even though Downey Jr does not put a foot wrong throughout (and Rourke is surprisingly good as the pesky Ruskie).

Unfortunately, there’s less humour or clever backchat than in the original and Johansson, having made such an impressive entrance, completes her SFX-enhanced kung fu moves never to be seen again. If you’re after a thrilling box office blockbuster then Iron Man 2 certainly hits all the right spots, it’s just there’s this lingering feeling if more work had been done on the plotting and script, it wouldn’t simply be thrilling, it would have been truly awesome.

From intellectual and aesthetic to bloody and brutal – the second historical movie this week is all about gore and rage and ravening heathens.

The setting this time is 117 AD Britain where Centurion Quintus (Michael Fassbender) is the only survivor of a raid by the Picts on his fort. With no comrades left to fight with he joins the legendary Ninth Legion under the command of its charismatic leader General Virilus (Dominic West) in a mass push into Pict territory in an attempt to kill their head man Gorlacon (Ulrich Thomsen) and the mute assassin Etain (Olga Kurylenko). But the Romans make the fundamental mistake of underestimating their enemy and the Picts massacre most of them leaving Quintus and a ragtag band of weary warriors to flee for their lives, the Picts in hot pursuit.

There’s some nice support work here by the likes of Liam Cunningham, Riz Ahmed and David Morrissey as the Centurions having to survive on their wits and little else and although the fight scenes are extremely well handled they do come to dominate the movie, leaving little space for more understanding of the Roman characters and absolutely none for finding out what makes the Picts tick.

Centurion is workmanlike and soldierly rather than being inspiring or surprising – a bit of a slog rather than an exhilarating dash.