Hugo Review

Scorsese spends an hour on a children's adventure about an orphan living inside a railway station clock, then reveals the whole thing as a preservationist's plea for Georges Melies, and the switch is the most personal move of his late career. Robert Richardson's 3D photography is the best argument anyone made for the format: the opening swoop across Montparnasse and down into the gears is showing off, but the depth is later spent on quiet things, dust in a projector beam, snow past a window, the layered space of the platform.

Ben Kingsley plays Melies as a man who burned his own work and cannot forgive himself for it, and the recreations of the glass-walled Star Film studio are built with obvious love. Asa Butterfield is a slightly cold center, and the Sacha Baron Cohen subplot with the station inspector belongs to a broader picture. The middle third sags while the children investigate. But the last half hour, a room full of people watching a rocket hit the moon again, is the sincerest thing Scorsese has filmed.