Old people freak me out.

The original film school nerd has outdone himself – his adaptation of the Dennis Lehane thriller has Hitchcock references by the lorryload

Martin Scorsese has, for many years, been active in the preservation of cinematic works whose makers are no longer able to protect
them themselves. The Film Foundation, the organisation he helped set up in 1990, has fought forced colourisation of black and white films, championed forgotten directors, and lists more than 500 films to which it has contributed to the restoration. Three of these are films by Alfred Hitchcock: Saboteur, Shadow of a Doubt and Suspicion. All three begin with "S". Can it be such a coincidence, then, that Scorsese's new film, in which he appears to be trying to make a new Hitchcock film in 2010, also begins with "S"?

Shutter Island, which has just premiered at the Berlin film festival, is adapted from a Dennis Lehane novel and set in 1954 (the year Hitchcock released Dial M for Murder and Rear Window). The locale is a "Hospital for the Criminally Insane", situated on a small island where there is conveniently an old military fort and a lonely lighthouse. Two cops – Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo – are called in to investigate an escaped inmate, who may or may not be a mass murderer. You can imagine Scorsese riffling through the novel and thinking: "You know, old Hitch would have loved this …" It makes even more sense considering a couple of years back Scorsese consented to shoot a fantastic little promo film for a Spanish cava producer in which he claims to have discovered three pages of an unknown Hitchcock script and then shoots it "the way he would have made it then, only making it now".

Scorsese has always been a film school nerd – the original title of his Hollywood "generation" was the "movie brats", as the first group of American film-makers to have emerged from actual film education programmes to (eventually) storm the gates of the industry citadel. His films have always had swotty little pastiche moments among the death and dread; he was doing it years before Tarantino ever came to town.

Shutter Island is an out-of-body pastiche to rival New York, New York, Scorsese's attempt to make a Vincente Minnelli musical. One thing Hitchcock wouldn't have done, though, is throw in sledgehammer replicas of shots from his previous movies: Shutter Island contains a shower scene (Psycho), a clambering-up-very-tall-building scene (Vertigo) and a scrambling-precariously-up-rocks scene (North by Northwest). There were probably many more, but the plot is so complicated it's tricky to keep your attention on both at the same time.

This is Scorsese's fourth collaboration in a row with DiCaprio – if you only count proper fiction features – and this partnership defines Scorsese's late period. (For a while it looked like Daniel Day-Lewis might become the new De Niro, but it's clear that DDL prefers to be a moving target.) Whatever critics might end up saying about Shutter Island, I'm of the opinion that DiCaprio is still far too lightweight a performer to carry the grizzled, haunted character that Scorsese is asking him to portray here. When he was young, DiCaprio did well as a fresh-faced scrapper. Now he's in his 30s, he looks like a jaded pretty-boy. His best film, Catch Me If You Can, exploits his unlined physiognomy and unthinking affect; when he's asked to suggest hidden depths – as in Revolutionary Road – it doesn't work nearly so well.

We've been seeing previews for, like, a year now. Still surprised that Scorsese's first regular feature since finally winning an Oscar got dumped into February. This'll be the Saturday Night at the Movies pick this weekend.

The previews have been redone a couple times, but the first one was blatantly awash in Hitchcock references.

I'll wait for the DVD on this one. Something's wrong when it gets dumped in February and needs so many trailers to create buzz. I agree with that review above that DiCaprio just doesn't have the weight to carry these kinds of roles.

Scorsese is my favorite living director. I'll be all over this one.

Silence Of The Lambs was a special case. Horror movies usually don;'t win Best Picture but that movie had tremendous momentum with a career performances by both Hopkins and Foster (both never better).