HUNTSVILLE — I’ve often said to anyone willing to listen to me that Martin Scorsese is our greatest living filmmaker.

Whenever I make this claim, I’m inevitably confronted by questions. Why do I prefer him over people like Joel and Ethan Coen, Clint Eastwood, Stephen Daldry or Jonathan Demme?

Thos are all great names, and believe me I could heap tons of praise on them as well. But what sets Scorsese apart, what makes him, in my mind, the undisputed King of the Movies, is his daring.

It’s a cliché word, and it’s been applied to Scorsese before, by people far more credentialed than I, but it’s the right word. A Martin Scorsese Picture, even today, is an experience like no other. It’s magnificently detailed and yet viciously primitive, subtle yet bold, striking yet tender. When you see his films, you feel without question you are in the hands of a master.

So, Martin Scorsese is my favorite filmmaker, and flicks like “Shutter Island” are the reason why.

Leonardo DiCaprio (who has succeeded Robert DeNiro as Scorsese’s chief collaborator) stars as U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, who has been assigned along with partner Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) to investigate the disappearance of a patient from a high security psychiatric facility on a remote island.

Upon arrival at the creepy facility, they are advised that their missing person somehow vanished from a locked cell in the middle of the night, and escaped barefoot into the rocky terrain. After finding a mysterious slip of paper in the missing woman’s cell suggesting that things aren’t what they seem, Daniels and Aule experience resistance from the physicians Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) and Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow), who refuse to turn over documents vital to the investigation.

As a hurricane moves in, the Marshals find themselves trapped in a hostile environment, surrounded by madmen, and locked in a web of deceit, all while Daniels is continually haunted by dreams of his wife (Michelle Williams), who died in an apartment fire years earlier.

In many ways the film functions as a tribute to the pulp and noir thrillers of Hollywood’s golden age (something Dennis Lehane, the author of the novel, intended from the beginning). All the trappings of a classic thriller are here: a gothic setting, trench coats, fedoras, grim looking men gathered around fireplaces, and a mystery that only gets deeper as the film moves forward. Scorsese, who is also in many ways our greatest film student as well, revels in this, drawing on the wisdom of his forbears (Hitchcock is of course the most obvious) to craft a tale that pays homage to the classics of the genre while unleashing his own brand of brutal cinema magic to push the film into the modern age.

One of the hallmarks of a Scorsese film is his unparalleled camera technique, and while I’m not one to generally point casual viewers toward aesthetic viewing, when it comes to Scorsese you just can’t help it. The man is a virtuoso with the camera, crafting shots that are the stuff of legend at every turn, from a ship slowly emerging through fog to a mind-blowing tracking move up a spiral staircase. Hitchcock’s influence is all over it, but it’s pushed to another level in the hands of Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker, who is in my mind the best film editor working today.

DiCaprio holds up his end of the bargain as well. His accent gets a little shaky in the middle, but the visceral subtlety of his performance cancels it out. Kingsley’s complexity is unmatched, von Sydow delivers his usual creepy magnificence, and look out for a stellar scene by Jackie Earle Haley as one of the most dangerous patients; one of our finest character actors at the top of his game.

There are times in this film, particularly near the end, where you mind find some of the story elements at play to border on hokey, even predictable, but for once, don’t worry about that. This is a tale paying tribute to and recreating a genre that is in many ways long dead, so the plot is bound to rehash some of what you might have seen or read before. Like any real great story, what matters isn’t the subject, but the interpretation (there’s nothing new under the sun, after all), and with “Shutter Island,” we see familiar story conventions catapulted into a whole new stratosphere. Martin Scorsese is still the best.

Matt’s Call: It’s definitely not for the faint of heart, but if you crave a real cinematic experience, this is where you’ll find it. As I was leaving the theatre, a friend asked me what I thought. All I could do was point to the screen and say: “That’s how it’s done.”