HUGO 3D: A Boy's Story

Martin Scorsese released a beautiful 3D film on November 23, that is both his best directorial effort since (at least) The Departed and the best use of the 3D medium for immersing the audience in the story of the film since.. well, probably since the flying scenes in How To Train Your Dragon.

The story, following the young orphan Hugo's (Asa Butterfield) adventures in a 1930s Parisian metro station, his battles with the station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) and his friendship with a girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) also living in the station who is being raised by film pioneer Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), chugs forward too slowly before finally springing to life.

According to Manohla Dargis, The New York Times, " 'Hugo' is the tale of a boy, one of fiction's sentimental orphans, and the world he invents, yet, unsurprisingly, its most heartfelt passages are about Melies. The old filmmaker is as broken and in need of revival as the automaton, and while you can guess what happens, it's the getting there — how the clock is wound — that surprises and often delights. Waves 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."