Hugo: Critic Reviews

I found Hugo to be unrewarding, despite its impressive look.

A haunting, piquant melodrama about childhood dreams and yearnings, enhanced with a pleasant survey course in early film history.

It's serious, beautiful, wise to the absurdity of life and in the embrace of a piercing longing.

Scorsese has created an exquisite jewel box of a movie, polished and honed to glittering, diamond-hard brilliance.

A wondrous blend of fantasy and mystery that will appeal to adults as well as children.

If ever the movie gods were to smile on an adaptation, it would be Scorsese's take on Selznick's bestselling book, a valentine to the cinematic artists whose work the filmmaker has toiled so tirelessly to champion and preserve.

Yes, "Hugo'' is a family film and, yes, your children and your inner child stand to be enraptured, but the family Scorsese really made this for is the 100-year-old tribe of watchers in the dark.

A personal statement disguised as a sellout.

"Come and dream with me," a filmmaker pleads in Martin Scorsese's exquisite fantasy "Hugo," offering an invitation that's clearly extended from Scorsese himself.

Thematic potency and cinematic virtuosity -- the production was designed by Dante Ferretti and photographed by Robert Richardson -- can't conceal a deadly inertness at the film's core.

Aside from being one of Scorsese's most personal films, it's also one of the least cynical films of this or any other year.

For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film...

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.

"Hugo" is unlike any other film Martin Scorsese has ever made, and yet possibly the closest to his heart: a big-budget, family epic in 3-D, and in some ways, a mirror of his own life.

"Hugo" is big, and it exists mainly to dazzle, but its storytelling ambitions are more modest. I enjoyed it more than many a later Scorsese picture.

A state-of-the-art affair, an epic adaptation of Selznick's pretty-epic-itself tome, full of dazzling visuals and rapturous tributes to Melies and the magic of movies.

Scorsese's mad infatuation with films and filmmaking streams through every frame of this gorgeous adventure.

Hugo is pure movie magic.

What Scorsese has really made is a beautifully crafted love letter to movies, the passion of his life. What sounded like an odd pairing winds up being a perfect fit.

In attempting to make his first film for all ages, Martin Scorsese has fashioned one for the ages.

It's as if David Copperfield wandered into a History of Film lecture. Maybe it isn't a great idea to wait till you're nearly 70 to make your first kid movie.

A stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.

Movie magic hangs in the air of Martin Scorsese's Hugo, much like the steam and dust that fills almost every frame.

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that 'any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.' It's a sentiment that Scorsese seems to have taken to heart...

'Hugo': Scorsese's humbling hommage to his favorite art