Hugo (2011)

IMDb Listing
This comes disguised as a children’s film and marketed accordingly, but in actuality it’s an intensely personal film by Scorsese. It’s about Hugo Cabret (played by Asa Butterfield), an orphan who lives in the clock tower of a 1930s Paris train station, trying to fix the mechanical man that his father left behind when he died. I knew little of the film’s plot going in, and I was amazed at the unexpected directions that the story takes, eventually encompassing the very origins of cinema itself. There are a number of performances here that I admired, such as those by Ben Kingsley, Chloë Grace Moretz, Michael Stuhlbarg, and even Sacha Baron Cohen in a broadly comic and slightly menacing role as the station’s police inspector. Some of the more standard children’s movie elements, such as the chase scenes through the train station, feel uninspired, but even still the movie is beautifully shot and of course Scorsese’s typical technical mastery is on display. What stays with me more than anything, though, is how terrifically warm-hearted the movie is for a film that is in a lot of ways about disappointment and grief. It’s not one of the great movies of Scorsese’s career, but it’s one of the most lovingly made and one of the most purely enjoyable. 9/10