Hugo

This Week in DVD: 2/28/12

It's a Beauty Day for DVD releases with the release of the Academy Award winning Hugo, The Kid With a Bike, and one of the best films of last year. Also, Johnny English Reborn and the Canadian action thriller Bounty Hunters.

Beauty and the Beast 3D Review

Beauty and the Beast returns to the big screen this weekend (with a 3-D retrofitting) just a shade over 20 years after its initial release and several years after an extended cut of the film made the rounds. The film – which was one of my fondest childhood movie going experiences – holds up nicely in a thematic sense, with as much love for cinematic craft as Hugo and The Artist, but while the 3-D does add to the film, the HD transfer makes a case that maybe not all hand drawn animated films should be toyed with.

Hugo Review

Hugo is the kind of ambitious and earnest miscalculation that could only be made by someone with great love and passion. For his latest film, Martin Scorsese adapts author Brian Selznick’s children’s book The Invention of Hugo Cabret, but at the same time takes the material so personally that the film’s good intentions are often ungainly and out of alignment with the actual story of the film. The material is definitely within Scorsese’s field of vision, but the famed director loses sight of audience expectations and creates a film wholly for the most academic fans of film studies.