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100This is one of the year's best films.
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75A flawed but entertaining (and perhaps informative) tale.
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75Scorsese, I think, is so invested in making The Aviator upbeat and rousing that the movie never quite reveals, the way that "Kinsey" or "Ray" or "A Beautiful Mind" or even a good E! True Hollywood Story do, how its hero's vision and his grand torments could be flip sides of the same temperament.
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60Brisk, glossy and gloriously art-directed, Scorsese's lavish biopic is a pop trifle, engaging but not compelling.
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75The movie equivalent of a lavish coffee-table book, a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood from one of its foremost students.
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88When it flies, it soars.
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75The Aviator has a hole in its center, and Scorsese fills it the only way he can, with spectacle. He makes The Aviator colorful and entertaining from beginning to end. There are worse things.
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75Has to be called one of the year's best movies. Credit goes partly to the built-in fascination of its subject and partly to its excellent cast.
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75As luscious as the filmmaking craft here is, it lacks the rude vitality, the unpredictability, the pure American craziness of the films that should have won him (Scorsese) the Oscar: "Mean Streets," "Taxi Driver," "Raging Bull," and "GoodFellas."
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80Tainted or not, Hughes' life was a remarkable one, and, flawed or not, Scorsese's film version deserves the same accolade.
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70Watching the actors and gorgeous trappings is an adventure in cognitive dissonance. I didn't believe a single minute in almost three hours, but enjoyed being there all the same.
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60We may enjoy watching the spectacles, but we don't much care for, or even have a feeling for, the guy in the cockpit.
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78It’s bravura, classic Hollywood filmmaking, and you like to think that Hughes himself would have viewed it, if not appreciatively, then at least with a sense of kinship.
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70Lots can be said for The Aviator as entertainment, though not much for it as edification.
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75Scorsese has crafted a luxurious entertainment that goes down like a flute of sparkling, silky champagne.
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75Martin Scorsese understands one character better than any other American director: the man who rises in the world to wealth or prominence without attaining what he wants most. That's why Howard Hughes is an ideal subject for this director.
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91The Aviator, though, if not prime Scorsese, is the closest thing in a long time to the old Scorsese. What a splendid year-end gift!
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100An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama, The Aviator flies like one of Howard Hughes' record-setting speed airplanes.
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75Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas. His most gorgeous, too, with the peaches'n'strawberries'n'cream palette of early Technicolor films.
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100Sumptuously exciting, glowing with expertise, seething with life, gorgeously designed and thrillingly articulated.
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91It's not his (Scorsese) best film, but it's his most accessible and most thoroughly entertaining.
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75Running at about three hours, The Aviator is long, and the momentum occasionally flags. The depiction of Hughes's first mental breakdown feels a little obsessive-compulsive itself.
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100If you didn't know that Martin Scorsese made The Aviator, the enthralling new adventure-biography of Howard Hughes, you might think it was the calling card of a neophyte visual genius.
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63A lush, panoramic, dizzyingly portrait of the many-tentacled entrepreneur Howard Hughes. Unfortunately, though it may finally gain an Oscar for director Martin Scorsese, it is not his best work. The movie is disappointingly flat.
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80Hugely entertaining and extravagantly empathetic.
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100Despite the film's sporadic lulls, both director and star are on full beam. The first and third hours of this 20th-century epic are as dazzling as big-scale movies get.
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60Visually sumptuous if disappointingly hollow account of Hughes's early life.
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80A frenzied, sometimes overreaching biopic that paints in bold colors on a huge canvas, the film stars a never-better Leonardo DiCaprio--as perfectly cast here as he was miscast in "Gangs."
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70Despite its star's heroic efforts, The Aviator is a gorgeous jet, flying on automatic pilot.
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70A triumph of production design...As a character study, though, The Aviator is downright squeamish.
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80But Cate Blanchett ... ahhhh. She doesn't impersonate Katharine Hepburn, she channels her.
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90DiCaprio is astonishing.
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50The Aviator could've been a "Raging Bull" brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.
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100Brilliantly entertaining.
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80Scorsese has crafted a rip-roaringly gorgeous-looking, beautifully acted biographical epic. But while firing on all cylinders, there's something oddly distancing about the picture.
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60This same film, shot for shot, line for line, could have been much more solid and engrossing, much farther up the Parnassian slope, with a better actor as Hughes.
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88So breathtaking is the action.
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70A fun and loving biopic
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90The result is an admirably bumpy ride of a biopic, a rare one that leaves you feeling not safe but bracingly unsettled.
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90This is Scorsese’s "Schindler's List", for better and for worse (mostly the better).
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80DiCaprio shines, dispelling fears that he hasn’t the weight to carry such a complex, forceful role.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 93 out of 137
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Mixed: 15 out of 137
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Negative: 29 out of 137
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PlixikW.10amazing movie. awesome directing by scorsese and awesome acting by dicaprio.
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