A theater magician captivated by film in 1895, Méliès championed fanciful stories, including his 1902 landmark "A Trip to the Moon." In Hugo Méliès' story emerges though his interaction with the title boy, an orphan who secretly lives in Paris' Montparnasse train station where he maintains huge, complicated clocks while trying to reanimate an automaton, the sole beloved item remaining from his father. It's jeopardized by the glum proprietor of the station's toy store, Méliès, who has no use for the thieving Hugo, though Méliès' godchild Isabelle befriends the boy. Meantime, Hugo must also duck and dodge the eye and arms of the station's Chief Inspector accompanied always by his terrifying Doberman and distracted only by his attraction to flower seller Lisette.

As Méliès, Ben Kingsley embodies the defeated man whose film career crashed, leaving him a broken, rather like the automaton. How his legendary work is discovered and integrated dominates the heartwarming story while several subplots tease out archetypal themes and numerous allusions to great, early cinema. My favorites are clips from Harold Lloyd's Safety Last and the Lumière brothers "Train Entering a Station" (La Ciotat), recreated here as it played then with audience members shocked by the projection. Above all, the extensive inclusion of Méliès' films gives Hugo an historical impact beyond its considerable entertainment value, and there's plenty of that.

Adapted and expanded by Josh Logan from Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo has a busy plot, spectacularly delivered in 3D. Vertiginous angles and exhilarating, moving camera shots justify 3D in wondrous, active compositions. The art direction dominated by browns and darker tones captures the time period, as does the music. Though a bit too long at two hours 10 minutes, Hugo transported me into a lovely, humane world with inspired ideas and acting by Jude Law as Hugo's father, Sacha Baron Cohen as the station inspector, Emily Mortimer as Lisette, Chloë Grace Moretz a radiant Isabelle, and Asa Butterfield as Hugo. Delighted with this film, I hope Scorsese keeps making movies for his children and the child in all of us. At area cinemas.