Hugo:

A heartwarming tale for movie lovers. It was a great Thanksgiving day movie.

At the moment of greatest rapture in Martin Scorsese’s 3-D “Hugo”—a film with many moments of happiness—a twelve-year-old Parisian boy, Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield), and his pal Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) are leafing through a book of film history, when images from the pages start to move and then spring to full motion-picture life. The time is the nineteen-thirties, and Scorsese and his technicians are looking back to the pioneers, jumping through restored versions of films by the Lumière brothers, Edwin S. Porter, D. W. Griffith, and, most centrally, Georges Méliès, the inventor of fantasy and science fiction in the cinema. For Scorsese, the early movies are a procession of miracles: the directors realized that sixteen frames passing through a camera every second could yield illusions, disappearances, transformations, magic. In recent years, while making his own movies, Scorsese has dedicated himself to film history and preservation. He has put this ardent attention at the center of a beautifully told and emotionally satisfying story for children and their movie-loving parents. “Hugo” is both a summing up of the cinematic past and a push forward into new 3-D technologies. James Cameron’s “Avatar” was a luscious purple-green spectacle—a fantasy of the natural world. “Hugo” is a fantasy of the mechanical world: much of it is devoted to the workings of a clock, a camera, an automaton, and a train station that functions like a huge machine. No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.

Like many children’s classics, “Hugo,” based on the extraordinary novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” (2007), by Brian Selznick, is the story of an orphan. Hugo’s father (Jude Law), a horologist, dies, and the boy inherits his passion; he runs the clocks in the Gare Montparnasse, including the two giants, one facing into the station and the other onto the street. Like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame or the Phantom of the Opera, Hugo lives a secret life in a public place—a rubbishy room up in the clockworks, where he tinkers with inventions old and new. He’s a self-reliant boy, wary, inarticulate but courageous, and he knows every corner of the vast station. The terminal has its own society and permanent residents, including the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a pompous prig who rounds up boys like Hugo and sends them to an orphanage, and a cranky old man who presides in silence over a toy store—Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley) himself, mourning his lost past. Between 1896 and 1913, Méliès made more than five hundred short films, including the lovely, antic “Voyage to the Moon,” but his company went bust and the French Army seized most of the film prints, melted them down, and turned the liquid celluloid into boot heels. After that, Méliès was forgotten.

Selznick’s book begins with a series of pencil drawings that feels like an introductory film sequence—establishing shots, medium shots, and closeups. Scorsese begins the same way, but in color, and instantly we get a sense of the film’s characteristic look. Working with the cinematographer Robert Richardson, from a screenplay by John Logan, Scorsese shoots from the children’s point of view as often as possible. He brings the third dimension into play not only in action sequences but as an enlargement of everyday life. The grownups pushing past the kids as they rush to make a train are as threatening as the Roman legions; at one point, Isabelle slips, and impatient feet trample on her. Narrow spaces and hidden places would naturally matter enormously to a furtive child, and Scorsese chases after Hugo down tunnels and along passageways and up a stairway to his room—the view up the stairway keeps telescoping in depth. Hugo is a spectator, always peering out at something, and the Paris he sees from his aerie is tinted dark blue, with glistening white lights—the colors of wonder. Parts of “Hugo”—the station, interiors of apartments—were shot on sets, but the movie depends on painted and digitized backgrounds. They are intentionally artificial, like something in a children’s book, or, more to the point, like the fanciful sets that Méliès used in his movies. In a flashback, Scorsese re-creates Méliès’s glass-walled studio and his films, with their exuberance of creatures, “natives” with spears, nymphs hanging from the stars—sheer exultant zaniness, part magic show, part burlesque, and all cinema.

Some of the scenes between Hugo and Isabelle are more methodical and explicit than they need be, and the pieties of a film historian (Michael Stuhlbarg) who has made reviving Méliès’s movies his life’s work are repetitive and cloying. But these are minor flaws. The emotional pull of the story is irresistible: the boy needs a family, the illustrious filmmaker needs to regain his past, and a love of movies brings them together. “Hugo” is superbly playful. Scorsese stages the moment in 1896 when, at least according to legend, Méliès’s rivals, the Lumière brothers, showed a film of a train rushing toward the camera and sent the audience scrambling. Just the year before, a train had actually crashed through the passenger area at Gare Montparnasse and sailed out into the street. In “Hugo,” the hero has a terrifying dream, perhaps an unconscious recollection of that event. Reality, filmed illusion, and dreams are so intertwined that only an artist, playing merrily with echoes, can sort them into a scheme of delight.

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I saw Hugo today, I was very pleased, at the end I was also pleased to see that people gave it applause. I will be buying it on BluRay when its released.

Hugo a lovely film. Among other pleasures, it's visually stunning. Scorsese uses 3-D to its fullest, not to make the audience duck, but to add richness to images. Probably the best use of 3-D I've seen. Most 3-D films are indistinguishable from 2-D, just more expensive.

My one caveat has to do with the film's fascination with film. Most people don't share a director's concern with the craft of film making, or share Scorsese's appreciation of old films and film-makers such as Melies. It's daring of him to move these esoteric concerns from the art house to the mainstream.

I thought that the film was built around a primary metaphor: the comparison of machinery, clockwork, and "fixing things" to the work of a film director. Scorsese probably experiences his films not as audiences do, but as a series of technical problems to be solved.

There are also some outstanding performances. Ben Kingsley is superb, as usual. Sacha Baron Cohen (Borat) surprises in a comic performance.

I want to see this film. I didn't have the chance yet.

I gave the book as a gift to my nephew's 10 year old a few years ago (The Cabinet of Hugo Cabret)

and I will give the authors second book to my other niece's daughter who is also 9 this January.

I watched HUGO last night.

Everything said about it is true. This is a good, heartwarming film...

I watched Hugo about a month and a half ago with my parents. They normally HATE 3D movies, and complain that they give them headaches.

No such complaints this time. They thoroughly enjoyed it. The 3D was used very effectively, not just as a gimmick, but to truly immerse the viewer.

I have Avatar on Blu-ray (non 3D) and watching it at home, was actually more enjoyable than seeing it in the theater. I enjoyed Avatar in 3D, but the 2D version was better.

With Hugo, I expect the opposite to be true. The 3D experience was at the heart of what this movie was doing. It was bringing film alive. It was breaking the fourth wall, to invite the viewer along. When they took old films, and converted them to 3D, it was in a way that brought them to life, and made you feel the joy the filmmakers must have had in making them.

Hoping not to spoil anything, there is a close-up of Ben Kingsley at the end, that is almost beyond belief. It really makes you feel a part of that world, and makes what he is saying all the more important, because you feel his humanity jump off the screen.

Hugo did something very special. It didn't just tell the tale of early cinema, it made you a part of it.

I saw Hugo twice at the theater and bought the DVD. There are very few movies I see twice at the theater, but this was worth seeing twice on the big screen in 3-D.

I also saw it more than once. Excellent film.

It's amazing that even though Hugo is out on DVD, Hugo 3D is still showing at several theaters in town.

One of the cable channels showed HUGO today.

I had forgotten how wonderful film can be.

If you have the chance to see this, be patient and you will be rewarded with a warm and happy feeling.