Hugo (2011)

It takes gut to make a movie out of a book who's story is told almost entirely in pictures. I know, a silent film won best picture this year, but that was also a gutsy move. This one succeeds spectacularly, and every single character in it plays their role to perfection. So here is the story. It’s 1920s Paris. Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is a young boy who divides his time between manually winding all the main train stations’ clocks and trying to repair a strange clockwork. These tasks entail him running around and peering out at things from behind clock faces --which does an excellent job of setting up who’s who and what’s what at the station, most notably that Hugo has to stay out of the clutches of the station inspector (Sasha Baron Cohen), who seems to delight in throwing unattended children into a police van bound for the nearest orphanage. Hugo has a strained relationship with toymaker (Ben Kingsley) who has a stall at the station, and he is befriended by his granddaughter, Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz. He teaches her about movies and she teaches him about books. Gradually she teases out Hugo’s backstory: his father (Jude Law) was a museum worker who died in a fire, then his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone) brought him to the station to help with his clock-winding job and promptly vanished. His father was trying to repair the clockwork figure before he died, and Hugo thinks (though he knows it’s crazy) that if he can repair the automation it will deliver a message from his dead father. In the end, the kids have adventures, the grown-ups fall in love, there are close shaves and narrow escapes and a movie studio that was made entirely of glass and a movie maker who lost his way. What’s not to like?