Critics reviews

Winter requires silent cinema's warmth. I suspect Scorsese knows this, too, considering Hugo's Christmas release. It's a lovingly crafted confection for multiplexes, a charmed adventure wrapped around a crash-course on film preservation's rocky history. The lesson's never dry or forced, but as luminous as the City of Lights itself.

The death of cinema has been heralded countless times over the past several decades, suggesting that we are well into its ghostly afterlife. Martin Scorsese'sHugo surveys cinema from this postcinematic station, returning to the profound connection between childhood wonder and early cinema.

The books most often shown and mentioned within Hugo are storybooks; most significantly, perhaps, the movie history book that the children consult is a work of narrative history. Hugo's bibliophilia, then, helps the film construct a cinema history that leads naturally from the stories of early cinema into the kind of narrative storytelling that Scorsese himself does so well.

With every new filmmaking technology at his disposal, Scorsese creates a hyper-detailed alternate universe, a place where cinema functions as an upsetting force--opening up new possibilities, shifting the status quo, healing old wounds and bringing out the good in seemingly bad people. It's hopeful, naïve, and intoxicating.

Still can't get into the wide-eyed, self-congratulatory "magic of the movies" guff or Hugo's quest for a surrogate family; his notion that the automaton might somehow write a message from his dead father, even though Dad perished while the thing was still utterly broken, just feels like shameless pandering.