I love many of Martin Scorsese's films.

I still remember the breathless excitement I felt while watching Mean Streets for the first time. A world of scruffy, claustrophobic bars and pool rooms populated by drunks, petty-criminals and wannabe wise guys. Keitel's quiet intensity and De Niro's youthful swagger set to some great late-60s pop songs.

I have seen the film at least 8 times. Writing about it now makes me want to watch it again.

Other great films followed: Raging Bull, The King of Comedy, After Hours, Goodfellas and (perhaps) Casino.

There were, inevitably, some artistic failures. New York, New York said more about Scorsese's coke-fuelled ego than it did about the classic Hollywood musicals that inspired him. But the failures were always interesting: flawed but clearly the work of a great director still trying to explore and develop his vision.

Then there was Gangs of New York. Surely (until now?) Scorsese's worst. A big, fat failure - and not even an interesting one. A wafer-thin plot that even Daniel Day Lewis' pantomime villain could not distract from. Scorsese knew it was a stinker. In many of the promotional interviews he said he would like the opportunity to go back to the film and re-cut it. Producer Harvey Weinstein later admitted that he should have given Scorsese more time to finish it.

But now we have Shutter Island. A mix of Hitchcock, Ray and Lang? Visually yes. And you could throw at least a dozen more directors into the mix as discernable influences.

I won't give away the breathtakingly unlikely Shyamalan-esque twist at the end. But it is the key weakness of the film. It makes you feel cheated.

The problem is that Scorsese spends the first two hours of the film setting up some very interesting narrative and conceptual threads: the political similarities and concrete links between Nazi Germany and McCarthyite America; the legitmacy, use and abuse of certain psychiatric drugs and treatments; the state and the prison system as tools of social control; the legitimacy and difficulty of individual dissent in a society saturated with totalitarian impulses.

Having spent two hours investing your interest in these ideas, and maintaining your faith that Scorsese will deliver an ending appropriate to their significance, we get a big silly plot-twist. It is so badly done, and so incongruous, that you almost feel Scorsese is laughing at you for taking the first two hours of the film seriously.

"You thought I was a great film maker? You talkin' to me? Well f**k you!!"

The Gangs of New York was just poor. Shutter Island is insultingly awful.

I know I risk expulsion from this site by The Word Central Committee for this, but it seems increasingly clear to me that Mad Men is considerably better than The Wire. Yes? No?

Why 'yes'?

Well, The Wire is somewhat 'obvious'. It tells and shows us things about the nature of power, crime, inequality and injustice in contemporary capitalist America that we sort-of already knew. It preaches the obvious to the already converted and does so in a plodding and unimaginative way.

The police are a complex mix of good and bad. Check.

Politics, law and the media are infected by money, racism and hypocrisy. Check.

Crime and drugs are complex products of urban crisis and decline. Check.

And to illustrate this we are shown police officers being complex, politicians being hypocritical and corrupt, and dealers living off the backs of the poorest and most vulnerable. Got all those points? You are now equipped to write a rather dull undergraduate essay on the sociology of crime in the modern American city.

Mad Men operates as a far more subtle and interesting critique of capitalism. This is about the intensification of consumerism as part of the debt-driven construction of a new 'society of the spectacle'. One of Don Draper's many causal lovers is a suitably abstract and rootless tax exile who floats through life asking: 'Why would you deny yourself something that you want?' This is consumer capital writ large.

Largely through the prism of life in one office we are presented with a rich and ambiguous sketch of changing relations between classes, sexes, races and business interests.

All this is subtle and suggestive - inviting multiple interpretations.

In short, The Wire is for those who want most of the thinking done for them (albeit slowly). Mad Men is for those who want the stimulation to think for ourselves....