Reviews
Empire Magazine
Kim Newman
"The movie is assembled with an obsessive delight in a combination of magic and mechanics, which unites his young and old heroes, a stage conjurer-turned-filmmaker and a lad with an inherited knack for fixing clockwork contraptions."
28/11/2011
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
"A delirium that delights and excites. "
01/12/2011
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The Scotsman
Siobhan Synnot
"It makes Avatar look like an Etch A Sketch."
28/11/2011
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The Daily Mail
Chris Tookey
"The film has terrific strengths. Unlike most 3D movies, Hugo was shot using 3D not as a money-making gimmick but as a storytelling device, to add height, depth, humour and intensity. Another virtue is that the picture shows a fascination with early cinema that's joyful and infectious. "
02/12/2011
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The New Yorker
David Denby
"A fantasy of the mechanical world ... No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders. "
28/11/2011
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The New York Times
Manohla Dargis
"Hugo is specifically about those observers of life who, perhaps out of loneliness and with desire, explore reality through its moving images, which is why it’s also about the creation of a cinematic imagination — Hugo’s, Méliès’s, Mr. Scorsese’s, ours. "
22/11/2011
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Time Magazine
Richard Corliss
"Hugo is more than a love letter to film preservation, a charitable donation to movie lovers, critics included. It is a fable as sensitive and powerful as any Scorsese film since The Age of Innocence nearly two decades ago. "
22/11/2011
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Time Out
Cath Clarke
"It's all a little too patchy to be truly great and the story splutters along in places, but ‘Hugo’s quixotic faith in movies is intoxicating."
28/11/2011
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The Times
Kate Muir
"Has [Scorsese] gone soft with his first children’s film? Well, yes, but his skills are as honed as ever, and he demonstrates that cinema is a magic box of tricks, then and now. "
02/12/2011
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The Observer
Philip French
"An imaginative history lesson in the form of a detective story.
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04/12/2011
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Total Film
Rob James
"There’s something truly perfect and poignant about using cinema’s breakthrough 3D technology to reach back into its past - and Scorsese revels in it.
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28/11/2011
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
"It’s a bit rich of Scorsese, of all directors, to bang on about the magic and the enchantment, given that his career and reputation were founded on bringing a raw new realism to the cinema. Never mind. Film buffs will be in heaven — as their poor children sit in the darkness, bored rigid by Uncle Marty’s overlong lecture.
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04/12/2011
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The Los Angeles Times
Kenneth Turan
"Given how inescapably bloody and violent so many of Scorsese's past films have been, it's something of an upset that "Hugo" is effective at all. The book Scorsese chose to adapt is out of the ordinary all by itself. "
23/11/2011
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The New Statesman
Daniel Trilling
"There is too much breathless talk of having an "adventure" and cinema being a "special place", a place "where dreams are made". Are dreams really made by the movie business, like so many cars rolling off a production line?
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01/12/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Robbie Collin
"For all its worthy intentions and technical brilliance, Hugo is a hard film to love: not only for children, who may find the largely immobile plot a slog, but also to viewers of any age who’d rather be charmed than merely wowed. "
01/12/2011
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
"A hi-tech magic lantern presentation on the wonder of early cinema, and its origins in the world of clockwork craftsmanship: toys, games, illusions."
01/12/2011
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The Evening Standard
David Sexton
"Scorsese's great films feel dangerous, fevered, hallucinatory. These days he seems wholly conservative, primarily keen on restoration. Hugo is cinema shining a light reverently up its own fundament. It's hard to know which generation this family film can truly entertain. Not the kids, I suspect. Grandpa, perhaps."
02/12/2011
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The Independent
Anthony Quinn
"There is nothing wrong with Scorsese wanting to celebrate cinema's first cracklings of genius, and his recreation of bravura moments ... goes deep into his own obsessive love of movie ingenuity. But it is mismatched to a tame and synthetic family-based confection that moves at a slouch and provokes nothing like the pathos intended."
02/12/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Jonathan Romney
"Seriously, who ever thought that Martin Scorsese would stoop to getting a comic reaction shot from a doberman?
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04/12/2011
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