With "Hugo" Scorsese reinvents himself and the movies while look at the past

Rating: 9/10 (30 June 2016)

Scorsese's "Hugo" has everything to win a place in the hearts of film lovers as "Cinema Paradiso" before it. With "Hugo" Scorsese reinvents himself as a filmmaker by reaching a wide audience and redeeming the past cinema history while he updates it, allowing contemporary audiences – already used to digital and three-dimensional formats - experience the same shocking feeling that the first viewers in the birth of cinema had. Although the film seems minutely prepared and staged as a goodbye to an industry model that is configured with D.W.Griffith in the early twentieth century and seems to unravel before our eyes under the hands of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. Before the fall of the hegemonic cinema we observe the loss of an aesthetic-colonial legacy, but at the same time the possibility of renewing the film industry with the expansion of voices and views. In a year that Kodak, Hollywood industry icon, entered bankruptcy Scorsese performs a rite of passage between the death of a cinema and the birth of another.