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100This is a great director's greatest love story.
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100Instead of sticking with the familiar, Scorsese has followed his impulses into something that feels entirely new but is still distinctively his. He has made a potential holiday classic, an exciting, comic and sentimental melodrama that will satisfy children and adults alike and reward repeat viewings for many years to come.
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100As well as an engaging fable about a homeless orphan living in a train station, Scorsese's film is a richly illustrated lesson in cinema history and the best argument for 3-D since James Cameron's "Avatar."
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100This kind of cinematic delight is a rarity, a warm and masterfully crafted reminder of why we love to go to the movies in the first place.
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100Bursting with earned emotion, Hugo is a mechanism that comes to life at the turn of a key in the shape of a heart.
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100An exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now.
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100The way Hugo deals with Melies is enchanting in itself, but the film's first half is devoted to the escapades of its young hero. In the way the film uses CGI and other techniques to create the train station and the city, the movie is breathtaking.
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100All the actors are wonderful, including Sacha Baron Cohen as a villainous Inspector.
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100Hugo is superbly playful.
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100Magical and imaginative, this eye-popping masterpiece from director Martin Scorsese will transport audiences to a place they won't believe.
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Nov 18, 2011100In attempting to make his first film for all ages, Martin Scorsese has fashioned one for the ages. Simultaneously classical and modern, populist but also unapologetically personal, Hugo flagrantly defies the mind-numbing quality of most contempo kidpics.
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100A fabulous and passionate love letter to the cinema and its preservation framed by the strenuous adventures of two orphans in 1930s Paris.
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91The performances are universally good, the 3-D is utterly gorgeous, and the nutshell history of the early days of movies is inspiring.
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91Hugo both ticks and flies by, a marvel meant to be pulled from the cabinet and enjoyed again and again.
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91It's a complex fusion of film history and personal history, filled with dazzling embellishments and unabashed sentiment about the glories of cinema.
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90Hugo states, in its adamant, straightforward poetry, that old things do matter.
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Nov 23, 201190There is much to observe, for Hugo (the film) is a marvel of spectacle, a sensory feast steeped in cinematic lore that proves pure joy is attainable in three dimensions.
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90Waves of melancholy wash over the story and keep the treacle at bay, as do the spasms of broad comedy, much of it nimbly executed by Mr. Baron Cohen.
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90What 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.
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89Although a nip and a tuck here and there might improve Hugo's overall pace, there is no denying that this love letter to the movies is something to cherish.
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88With Hugo, Martin Scorsese has accomplished what few in Hollywood are willing to try: make a movie for adults that arrives without sex, violence, or profanity and earns a PG-rating.
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88For cinematic sojourners, Hugo is a trip to the moon.
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88Overall, however, the manner in which the film blends the tale of an imperiled boy and the history of cinema makes for an ambitious and fanciful ride.
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88Scorsese builds Hugo in the Méliès manner, creating a complete, ravishing Parisian world on a soundstage in England and reveling in the sheer transporting joy of it. Hugo will take your breath away.
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83Hugo is a mixed bag but one well worth rummaging through.
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83Hugo is Scorsese's most personal film, from the standpoint of both an artist and a grandfather. He is as interested in Melies' posterity as in making a movie that his descendants can see before they're adults.
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80Scorsese transforms this innocent tale into an ardent love letter to the cinema and a moving plea for film preservation.
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75As much of a personal Scorsese picture as "Raging Bull" or "Taxi Driver." In some ways, this could be his most heartfelt movie.
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75What about the kids and families who have no connection to Méliès, little familiarity with Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton? Will Hugo keep them in their seats? I'm not sure.
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75Strangely, Scorsese's very passion for the subject matter turns out to be both a blessing and a curse for Hugo.
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75Rich and stimulating even when it wanders.
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Nov 22, 201175Scorsese's affection for cinema is, of course, no surprise, and Hugo doesn't shy away from stumping for the cause of his Film Foundation; which isn't to say it's a vanity project, at least not any more than any film with a budget in the nine figures is.
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75A stunning exercise in 3D and a delightful celebration of Scorsese's lifelong love of the movies, something he, like Hugo, developed on childhood.
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70For all the wizardry on display, Hugo often feels like a film about magic instead of a magical film.
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70Somehow, for me, this earnest, pretty movie never came to life on screen; it remained a curio in a cabinet, to be admired through a pane of glass.
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70The director's visually thrilling Hugo has real moments of 3-D magic. Sadly, they aren't quite enough to make this adaptation of Brian Selznick's celebrated novel, "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," a wholly satisfying experience.
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Nov 22, 201160Perfunctorily mounted as a children's adventure, Hugo is weirdly staid in its pacing, and the screenplay, by Scorsese's "Aviator" collaborator John Logan, is full of groaners. The movie is far more successful as a barely veiled issue flick.
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60You still can't help admiring the project's ambition; an odd combo of "Babe: Pig in the City" and Godard's "Histoire(s) du cinéma," Hugo is the strangest bird to grace the multiplex in a while.
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50Visually Hugo is a marvel, but dramatically it's a clockwork lemon.
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50Young Hugo (Asa Butterfield), a boy who literally lives inside the clocks he manages in a grand Paris train station in the 1930s, embodies one problem that bedeviled even Dickens: He's boringly nice.
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50The result is a movie that's kinetic yet slow, whose joys are architectural more than spiritual.