![]() General release THE DESCENDANTS ★★★★ (115 min) M IN MUCH the same humanist vein as his brilliant dramedy About Schmidt, director Alexander Payne (Election, Sideways, Citizen Ruth) again flexes his deep love of flawed characters who try to maintain dignity in the midst of an irreversible emotional crisis. The film might have tanked at the box office (see story), but so did Raging Bull and The King of Comedy, two Scorsese films that have earned classic status, as Hugo surely will. Visually the film is, by any fair measure, a standard-setting masterpiece while its story, based on the novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, is a passionate ode to cinema designed - perhaps too specifically - for film lovers. Using state-of-the-art technology, Scorsese uses the process to take us into the image, as his stunning opening shot attests. ![]() In a brilliant career studded with unarguable classics - Mean Streets GoodFellas Taxi Driver Casino The King of Comedy Cape Fear Raging Bull etc, etc - Hugo is both Martin Scorsese’s most beautiful film as well as a master class in how best to deploy 3D in the service of story. ![]() With the help of the inquisitive Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz), Hugo learns about the birth of cinema and the part Méliès played in it. He’s a curmudgeon of a toymaker who is mysteriously connected with the life-sized automaton Hugo’s father (Jude Law) discovered in a museum storeroom. (Note: The film can be seen in English and Japanese language versions.) Selected release HUGO ★★★★1/2 (126 min) PG SETTING the giant clocks in a 1930s Paris train station is orphaned boy Hugo (Asa Butterfield) who strikes up a bumpy relationship with Georges Méliès (Ben Kingsley). As well as being entertaining, Arrrietty will hopefully point punters to the 1997 film The Borrowers, a very good live-action rendition of the tiny people concept. Traditionally animated - Ghibli appears largely uninterested in digital animation - the film has an attractive pastel allure and director Hiromasa Yonebayashi generates an appreciable sense of danger courtesy of an evil housemaid and a hungry cat. Arrietty is the tiny teenage girl who has to learn to trust Sho, though her staunch father insists they move now that they have been discovered. Based on The Borrowers novels by Mary Norton and made in 2010, the film tells of Sho, a boy with heart trouble who moves to the country for peace and quiet, but discovers that the crawlspace of his new home is inhabited by a family of tiny people who ‘‘borrow’’ things to live. NEW RELEASES ARRIETTY ★★★ (93 min) G FROM Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio that regaled us with Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and Porco Rosso, comes another charming exercise in surreal whimsy. Full EG music listings are now online too.
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