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.

[Hugo is] a film that is a proclamation as much as it is a movie, a cause as much as an entertainment: this is cinema, it says, don’t let it die. In its fetching use of 3D and CGI imagery, it looks fearlessly forward even as it instructs about cinema’s origins. It could have been subtitled “Never Fade Away,” so steeped is it in the act of remembering.

Hugo is a moving, funny and exhilarating film, an imaginative history lesson in the form of a detective story. The film is a great defence of the cinema as a dream world, a complementary, countervailing, transformative force to the brutalising reality we see all around us.

When [the film] envisions the bond between art and lived life and mingles the textures of silent-film celluloid and digital apparitions, the evocation of cinema as “seeing your dreams in the middle of the day” is something to behold. Scorsese luxuriates in artifice, but at its generous best Hugo offers a lovely instance of technology made human and spun from one generation to the next.

This is a spectacular and gorgeously created film, with allusions to Harold Lloyd and Fritz Lang, and it's an almost overwhelming assault on the senses from the very first shot.

It’s all a little too patchy to be truly great and the story splutters along in places, but ‘Hugo’s quixotic faith in movies is intoxicating... [Scorsese] directs every film with the passion of his first. And it shows.

[Hugo] is a marvel of spectacle, a sensory feast steeped in cinematic lore that proves pure joy is attainable in three dimensions... Hugo is Scorsese's most visually accomplished film. He and cinematographer Robert Richardson exploit the possibilities of depth in every frame.

For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of, well, a magical film... I’m less excited by the Scorsese who studs his films with references to other movies and builds his universe from scratch than the Scorsese of the streets, who heightens and projects his volcanic emotions on the worlds he finds.