Paramount Pictures

Mark Ruffalo, left, and Leonardo DiCaprio co-star in the thriller Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese’s creepy adaptation of Dennis Lehane’s novel.

Wiseguys and goodfellas give way to hallucinations, nightmares and evil doctors in Shutter Island, Martin Scorsese’s creepy new mystery. Based on a novel by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River), with a screenplay from Laeta Kalogridis, this multisided thriller plays its secrets so cleverly that a viewer could easily get lost in its complex misdirection. Even when it becomes apparent that not all is what it seems, several other surprises lie ahead.

Courtesy photo

Dust & Illusions, which screens locally during Thin Line Film Fest, examines the history of Burning Man, an annual festival in the Nevada desert.

Thin Line Film Fest has harvested the kind of films other documentary festivals have taken decades to attract. This weekend, Texas’ only documentary film festival will screen Academy Award nominees and one special jury prize-winner from Sundance Film Festival.

20th Century Fox

Percy Jackson (Logan Lerman) stands triumphant with the trident belonging to his father, the Greek god Poseidon, in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.

Contemporary teenagers might seem firmly detached from the world of Greek mythology, but the young cast members in Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief hope to bridge that gap. The film, directed by Chris Columbus, is based on the first book in a fantasy series by Rick Riordan that throws its modern high school characters into the mythological realm through Percy, a misfit who learns he is really the demigod son of Poseidon, god of the sea.

Screen Gems

A brief, intense romance sparks between John (Channing Tatum) and Savannah (Amanda Seyfried) in Dear John.

Dear John goes trippingly down the same sugary path previously laid out by other offspring of “novelist” Nicholas Sparks. In the literary goo that is Sparky-world, love conquers all, even Alzheimer’s (The Notebook) and hurricanes (Nights in Rodanthe). And lovers defiantly overcome obstacles that would make the travails of Romeo and Juliet seem laughable. Coming soon: pestilence and a plague of frogs. Director Lasse Hallstrom showed an intelligence in transferring novel to screen in his adaptation of John Irving’s The Cider House Rules. Here, however, he struggles mightily before eventually succumbing to the saccharin-saturated Sparky-world.