Welcome back to Movieline Attractions, your regular guide to everything new, noteworthy and/or nudged back by a few months at the movies. This week, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio reunite to mixed reactions, a few holdovers do battle for the scraps, and... well, Polanski. That's about it. Let's survey the scene!
WHAT'S NEW: Shutter Island reunites Scorsese and DiCaprio in the mindf*ck tale of a U.S. Marshal attempting to sort out the disappearance of a child-killer from the film's eponymous mental institution. Paramount swatted it out of Oscar season for its genre (over?)indulgences and/or a lack of cash, but that's the past. Our own Michelle Orange vouches for it here, but here's perhaps the most ringing endorsement: "Shutter Island" allows the director and his (now four-time) star Leonardo DiCaprio to explore new areas of creativity and expression and take their audience on a bracing ride." Four-time star! You know what Scorsese and Robert De Niro made on their fourth collaboration? Raging Bull. So sure: This is the stuff of ghosts, impunity and indestructibility. Which translates to first place against weak sauce like week two of its thriller competition The Wolfman. The Leo Factor alone should pull in about $28.5 million; add another $6 million or so for lack of wide-release foes, and that's a No. 1 around at least $34 million.
Also opening: The Wall Street-conscience romance The Good Guy; the Oscar-nominated Israeli film Ajami, the one-week-and-out Parker Posey/Demi Moore dysfunctional-family effort Happy Tears, the Civil Rights-era drama Blood Done Sign My Name, and expanding into L.A. (and extended in New York), the fantastic documentary October Country.
THE BIG LOSER: Nothing new, really, though it will be interesting to see how Valentine's Day holds up or completely plummets in its second week. Could it fall by 55 percent? Maybe 60 percent? More? Whatever; it's Garry Marshall's world, the rest of us are just living in it. (I can't believe I just wrote that, but hey.)
THE UNDERDOG: Opening this week in limited release, The Ghost Writer may be the last new Roman Polanski film you'll see. Not to be ghoulish about it, but you know how it goes: Culture war, legal drama, shelved ballads, and then... this, a truly wicked cocktail of Iraq War judgment, Hitchcockian portent and 76-year-old Polanski's own over-the-top psychological prowess. Ewan McGregor plays an author hired to ghost-write the memoirs of a deposed British prime minister (Pierce Brosnan), who is slowly discovered to have a bundle of untoward ties to the CIA. Or does he? Peril ensues! Half the dialogue may as well have been contributed by your local community-college screenwriting class, and God knows what the hell Kim Cattrall is doing here, but the technique! Oh, the technique. Brosnan's tensed-out exile and Olivia Williams's (suspiciously) haunted wife bulk up the bizarre exercise, leaving one to ask: Is this the work of a schlub finishing his film from jail? Or the work of a master in need of a better first act? If nothing else, just pay to see the last three shots. You won't spend a more satisfying $10 all year. (At least until Animal Kingdom.)
FOR SHUT-INS: New DVD releases this week include the winning blaxploitation revival Black Dynamite, the slightly more earnest pulp-thriller Law Abiding Citizen, Chris Rock's tonsorial non-fiction adventure Good Hair, the devastating Irish drama Hunger, and, at long last, the long-delayed first seasons of Small Wonder and Barnaby Jones.