Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), left, meets Hugo (Asa Butterfield) inside the Paris train station that the title character calls home.
Can Martin Scorsese inspire a new generation of classic-film buffs, who marvel at the crank of an antique camera, the magic cascade of light through celluloid, and the fanciful, dawn-of-the-medium creations of filmmaker Georges Méliès?
That’s one question that surfaces after walking out of “Hugo,” Scorsese’s first-ever family film and first-ever 3-D project, which brings author Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” to the screen as a quasi-autobiographical labor of love for cinema’s foremost American master. It’s hard to say if Scorsese’s use of the latest technology to convey Selznick’s fundamentally filmic themes will indeed result in an audience of enchanted, curious youths, but for big kids already fond of motion-picture romanticism, there’s plenty of wizardry to be found.
The film’s title character (Asa Butterfield) is an orphaned boy who winds the clocks in a 1930s Paris train station, an occupation once overseen by his late father (Jude Law), a clockmaker and film lover with a passion for mechanical knickknacks. Moving gears and cranks are just about omnipresent in “Hugo,” appearing in the corners of frames as part of the young hero’s behind-the-scenes world, and underscoring the well-oiled perfection of Scorsese’s craftsmanship. Sweeping you into the station setting and adding locales like an ethereal Paris skyline and Méliès’ own home (where Hugo befriends Isabelle, a plucky bookworm played by the meteoric Chloë Grace Moretz), the director most certainly offers 3-D’s most sophisticated entry, unfurling smart visual reverie even when the movie lags around its middle.
More than a children’s adventure, “Hugo” emerges as a kind of offbeat biopic, with its weightiest emotional content reserved for Méliès, a tragic character beautifully played by Ben Kingsley. Devastated by the war-triggered death of his art, Méliès is a dreamer in need of resurrection, and Scorsese uses the salvaging of the real-life legend’s life and work to further transmit his own long-standing commitment to film preservation.
Egocentric? Nah, “Hugo” is far too lovely to be so cynically labeled. Cinema-centric? Indeed, and celebratory, and wondrous.
PG
Three-and-a-half reels out of four
Now playing in area theaters
PG-13
>Available Tuesday
Boosted by a handful of fine performances and an insistence on giving its black maids strong voices of their own, this amiable, goes-down-easy adaptation of Kathryn Stockett’s literary blockbuster hovers above other ostensibly anti-racist films made for white America, telling a tale that, however comfy, largely dodges condescension. Viola Davis is fantastic as head maid Aibileen, and breakout star Octavia Spencer brings potent laughs as the outspoken Minny. SPR
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Take Shelter Michael Shannon continues to perfect the art of bringing frightening depth to the mentally unhinged in “Take Shelter,” an impeccably crafted, pseudo-apocalyptic psychodrama from writer/director Jeff Nichols, who casts Shannon as a blue-collar worker plagued by visions of impending doom. In its effortless allegorical brilliance, the film leaves wide open the possible connections between the visions and our own world’s ills, letting the resonant paranoia of Shannon’s on-the-fringes, self-dismantling outcast speak for itself. The Descendants Working from one of the year’s best scripts (which he co-wrote with Nat Faxton and Jim Rash), “Sideways” director Alexander Payne makes a triumphant return after a seven-year hiatus with “The Descendants,” a beautifully humanistic portrait of family and the real ways, both private and public, that people grieve. With a fantastic cast led by George Clooney, the Hawaii-set film makes the grand most of its rare milieu, links its themes with unassuming cleverness, and offers humor and stirring pathos without an ounce of gooey sentiment. Meek’s Cutoff Kelly Reichardt’s elliptical western “Meek’s Cutoff,” which whittles the tale of a parade of Oregon Trail deviators down to three families and one ignorant guide, is a film whose experience truly begins after the credits roll. A slow and sparse...
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