Hugo

Gr 4 Up—Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of Brian Selznick's Caldecott-winning novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Scholastic, 2007), has remained faithful to its source. A young orphan named Hugo (Asa Butterfield) lives within the walls of a Paris train station circa 1931, looking after its clocks and trying to restore a strange automaton. He hopes that once the contraption made of nuts and bolts is repaired, it will write a secret message from his dead father (Jude Law). The penniless 12-year-old resorts to stealing the needed parts from a toy store—until he's caught. As part of his daily routine, Hugo swipes a croissant and a bottle of milk from a nearby café, but the film's veritable thief is the scene-stealing Chloë Grace Moretz as Isabelle, Hugo's problem-solving sidekick. She's the goddaughter of the cranky toy seller (Ben Kingsley), and she happens to have the key that makes the automaton work. With her help, the mechanical man comes to life and draws a clue that links Isabelle's godfather's past to the birth of cinema. In a significant departure from the book, Isabelle takes on the role of narrator, not Hugo, and they work more amicably to piece together the toy selle''s past. The only distracting note is the portrayal of the officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), a role beefed up considerably from the book, hopping and flailing about with a creaky metal leg brace while clumsily pursuing Hugo. Nevertheless, it takes a heavyweight filmmaker like Scorsese, also a noted advocate for film preservation, to make a movie where the climax is the rediscovery and unspooling of a black-and-white silent film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), by the French magician-turned-film-pioneer Georges Méliès. Like Selznick in the novel, Scorsese makes an eloquent plea to remember the past. When a character in the film remarks that movies are where dreams are made, it's no mere boast.—Kent Turner, School Library Journal