Hugo

For movie lovers, Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a goldmine of glories from films past. Some of Hugo's best moments are those that aren't actually Hugo. The film is full of clips from old silent movies, by Méliès and others, and it's a pleasure to see them lovingly restored and projected on to a cinema screen. The enduring weirdness of Méliès's A Trip to the Moon still provokes chills.

This is Paris in the snowy winter of 1931, a city in which elegance is seasoned with a delicious hint of squalor, and steam trains rattle in and out of one of its majestic stations. There, in the station's walls, is a secret apartment inhabited by a 12-year-old orphan called Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

He lives alone, since his beloved father (Jude Law) died and his drunken uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) - whose job it was to wind up the station clocks and who first trained him in the task - disappeared. Now Hugo diligently winds the clocks himself to avoid any troublesome investigations of his uncle's whereabouts, pilfers croissants, and dodges the fearsome, comic Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) who dispatches unaccompanied minors to the dreaded orphanage.

Butterfield, as Hugo, conveys the necessary mix of melancholy and hope, signaled with his bruised blue eyes. And in Scorsese's direction one can sense the desperate passion of a cinephile, rushing to convey the impact of the Lumière brothers, Cecil B. de Mille et al before the world moves on so quickly it can no longer remember to look back.

Adapted from Brian Selznick's best-selling novel, Hugo is a wonderfully nostalgic film, and its magic will touch all ages.