DC Merryweather’s review published on Letterboxd:
Hugo is no-one's idea of a kids movie, and doesn't contain anything that ever made anyone fall in love with movies.
What a dreary trudge through a sickly teal & orange 'wonderland' this is. I will give Scorsese the benefit of the doubt and accept that the complete artificiality of it all was deliberate. After all, the fact that it looks like a film set, and all of the extras milling about looked like extras milling about chimes with the homage to silent film forms going on in the little sub-stories taking place. It's a movie about movies, I get that. I just found it a bit soulless, that's all. As a piece of film confection it was too sweet for my tastes.
All the sweeping long camera glides and the moving around the insides of intricate clockwork mechanisms all looked wonderful, if very digital, as did the dream sequence in which the Montparnasse train accident is recreated. And all the stuff with the automoton was great - it's just a shame about the humans.
The two kids being the worst offenders, but Sacha Baron Cohen's pratfalling station guard with the odd London accent (everyone had an English accent in 1930s Paris, didn't you know?) was almost unbearable; so tiresome and unfunny.
I didn't mind Ben Kingsley as Georges Méliès, especially considering that if this was made in the 1990s it would have been Robin Williams in the part (This is a very sad-smile, dewy-eyed Robin Williams type of film, so we got off lightly there).
It is at least accurate in recreating the style of old movies though. There's even a disabled character whose twisted physical form is an outward sign of his inner badness, just like in all those old gothic melodramas. 'Nice' touch, Marty.
For something that constantly repeats the hackneyed phrase about the 'magic of movies', this is a film so completely and utterly lacking in energy. There's no magic, and little movement in this movie. And wading through the syrup drags.
At one point I checked the timer, convinced the film must be nearing the end. To my horror I was just over an hour in, with another hour yet to go. With the thin story seemingly spent already, my mind boggled with what the remaining 60 minutes was to be filled with. Fortunately the second half is purely concerned with Scorsese's fandom, so there's plenty of clips from the pioneering films of early cinema, and brief, giddy glimpses of silent movie stars.
Actually, that just made things worse. Silent cinema had Louise Brooks, and what do we get? Chloë "haha she's 11 and she said 'cunt'" Moretz. How depressing is that?