Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz in "Hugo." (Paramount Pictures)

It wasn’t that long ago we marveled over the adventures of another spritely orphan who launched out from another enchanted train station. But no amount of wand-waving and quasi-Latin recitation can top the magic in Martin Scorsese’s latest.

Harry, meet Hugo, on whom you’ve got nothing.

Leave it to Scorsese, so accomplished in cinematic bloodletting, to make something as cheerful, lustrous, and altogether wondrous as Hugo. The objective description of this film, you’ve probably heard, is incongruous with the 69-year-old director’s corpus: It’s adapted from a children’s novel. It’s rated PG. It’s presented in 3-D. (I’ll get to that later.)

Hugo comes from Brian Selznick’s 2007 book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, whose title character (Asa Butterfield) lives behind the walls of the Gare Montparnasse in Paris, circa 1931, where he and his father (Jude Law) tend to the station’s many impressive timepieces. But after his father dies, Hugo is alone—save a mostly absent alcoholic uncle (Ray Winstone)—in a vast train depot. All that’s left of Hugo’s father is a broken-down automaton he’d found in a museum rummage sale.

In fact, at the film’s beginning, Hugo’s closest living acquaintance is probably the station’s security guard (Sacha Baron Cohen), who with his bum leg chases Hugo around with a toy soldier’s gait. Luckily, one of these pursuits leads Hugo into Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) and her adoptive father Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), grumpy proprietor of the local toyshop. Hugo’s dreamlike Montparnasse also houses a bookstore, jazz café, and so many other amenities that when Isabelle promises Hugo an adventure that’s “Neverland, and Oz, and Treasure Island all wrapped into one,” she may as well be talking about the entire station beyond a few stacks of musty old tomes.

Isabelle lives for the written word. But Hugo, like Scorsese, is a devotee of the moving image, and when Papa Georges is revealed to be Georges Méliès, it’s the happiest accident and most inevitable result wrapped into one.

Hugo’s Méliès is not too far off from history’s. Like our own, this Méliès turned early filmmaking into fantastical dreamscapes with shorts like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and, most famously, A Voyage to the Moon, before succumbing to financial ruin and being forced to sell the prints of his nearly 500 short films, most of which were melted down and reconstituted as shoe heels. And just as the real Méliès did, this one wound up a toymaker in a train station.

But Scorsese isn’t just content to show us montages—and they are great montages—of restored clips. He’s reconstructed Méliès old stage', a glass house where dreams are forged and visual miracles discovered. Scorsese’s palate in these sequences is as colorful as the richest Kandinsky, almost startling to see from a director who has spent his career lurking in shadowy alleys and unlit apartments.

And about that 3-D. Forget the tropes of thrusting swords and flatulent animals; in Hugo we are swept across the Montparnasse platform as Hugo and Isabelle make their many escapes from the guards—scurrying beneath travelers’ overcoats, dashing through steam-filled mechanics’ corridors, climbing past brassy clock faces. When Scorsese recreates a screening of August and Louis Lumiére’s 1895 footage of a moving train, the audience’s jumpy reaction—thinking the engine would barrel off the screen—is precisely the sensation the purveyors of 3-D movies are selling today. Only in Hugo, for once, is it actually felt.

Because all of it, from the honeyed glow of Montparnasse to stills in history books jumping to life to the 3-D imagery to its young protagonists sneaking into a movie theater, is of a piece. We may complain about the declining quality of motion pictures these days, but we keep going back. Film is, as Orson Welles once said, a ribbon of dreams, capable of realizing our wild imaginations and greatest fantasies.

And by its sweet and uplifting final act, Hugo is a tapestry of love stories: Young Hugo and Isabelle; Papa Georges and his wife, Mama Jeanne (Helen McCrory); two café dwellers (Richard Griffiths and Francis de la Tour); even Baron Cohen’s bumbling inspector clods his way into the local florist (Emily Mortimer).

But the deepest love of all is that of the director for his medium. Watching Hugo, it’s impossible not to imagine the asthmatic kid sneaking into New York theaters to see the latest by Nicholas Ray and Elia Kazan, or the father of a young daughter finally being able to share his life’s work, or that deep down, we all lost it at the movies.

“Life has taught me happy endings only happen in the movies,” a character says later on. And though that sentiment hardly rings true for most of Scorsese’s films, in Hugo, happy endings never seem more deserved.

Hugo opens tomorrow.

*The 30th annual Brit Awards aired last night, garnering awards for Oasis, Jay-Z, Robbie Williams, Florence and the Machine, and Lily Allen. The night's biggest winner was American favorite Lady Gaga who scooped up all three awards she was nominated for: Best International Newcomer, Best International Female, and Best International Album. Oasis band member Liam Gallagher was a tad less thankful; after winning his Brit Award, he threw it into the crowd from the stage.

*Don't miss Esquire's fascinating and heartbreaking feature article on Roger Ebert. It's a moving piece that delves into his ongoing struggle with cancer and love affair with film.

*Chanel announces that Martin Scorsese has directed the commercial for its new men's cologne. The commercial, starring actor Gaspard Ulliel, is set to air in September. One can only hope that the ad will also incorporate Marty's three favorite things: blood, De Niro, and DiCaprio.

*Jay Leno's bandleader of 18 years, Kevin Eubanks, will soon be leaving. Eubanks will accompany Leno through his first few episodes back on The Tonight Show but will leave soon after, much like Leno's viewing audience.

*Trainwreck Courtney Love will finally be releasing Hole's (sans all the original band members) newest (and-five-years-in-the-waiting) record, Nobody's Daughter, on April 27.

*Tonight in City Lights: "Adam de Boer: Memory Meets Imagination Halfway" exhibit at District of Columbia Arts Center.

Hello and happy MLK Day! I'm going to blame the long weekend and its lack of arts news for the fact that I'm now going to write ~200 words about the Golden Globes: They were really awful! James Cameron wants to export his arty utopianism to small children in Africa and Asia! Ricky Gervais was OK! We remain lucky to have Robert Downey Jr.! Also, it was really unclassy when the show's producers cued the music during Michael Haneke's speech accepting the award for best foreign film—not that, like, what he had to say was any more valuable than, um, Drew Barrymore's speech (she won for her role in HBO's Grey Gardens). But aside from Martin Scorsese, Haneke was probably the most accomplished filmmaker in the room. Erm, quickly: Mo'Nique! Meryl! Jeff Bridges! (Sandra.)

The worst speech from the best actor? Christoph Waltz for Inglourious Basterds:

Thank you very, very much, members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. A year-and-a-half ago, I was exposed to the gravitational forces of Quentin Tarantino, and he took my modest little world, my globe, and with the power of his talent and his words and his vision, he flung it into his orbit—a dizzying experience. And then Lawrence Bender got to work and Harvey Weinstein, and David Linde and Universal. This whole planetary system of collaborators assembled around Quentin. And Brad decided to star, Diane Kruger and Melanie Laurent. And I needed reassurance, I was in awe, and I got this reassurance from the wonderful people at Weinstein ... Quentin made a big bang of a movie, and I wouldn't have dared to dream my little world, my globe, would be part of the constellation. And now you made it golden. Thank you very, very much.

(Also, there were some TV awards!)

- The Nevin Kelly Gallery is closing its retail space, DCist reported on Friday, but will continue to host pop-up shows.

- In Leno/Conan news: A deal—a more than $30 million deal—for Conan to leave NBC is in place, the New York Times reports. Also: An anonymous source tells the New York Daily News that Conan O'Brien's team rejected bringing on Lorne Michaels as a Tonight Show producer; comic Louis C.K. says Conan should've stuck with Late Night, WaPo reports; and Jay Leno's not the bad guy, insists Jay Leno's staff, who speak with the AP.

- Teen Dream, the third album the Baltimore dream-pop duo Beach House, drops at the end of the month. It'll come with a video for every song, each by a different director, and Gorilla vs. Bear is premiering one each day this week. The first video, for "Lover of Mine" depicts what would happen if my friends and I had 1) facial hair; 2) dropped a lot of acid; and 3) tried to re-create El Topo. Freaky!

The Last Waltz is a remarkable film, but it shouldn’t take a Scorsese to make a concert movie that repays repeat viewing. Even in a year that offered marketers many routes to consumers’ wallets—the 40th anniversary of Woodstock! the eighth anniversary of Bonnaroo!—there were few glimmers of hope—and enough turkeys to sate the enhanced appetites of audiences at Bonnaroo, Gathering of the Vibes, and Burning Man combined.

He looks at newly released—and rereleased—footage of John Lennon, Woodstock, Otis Redding, and more. Read the full article here.

The film chronicles Dylan's rise to superstardom, from being booed by Guthrie purists at the Newport Folk Festival to getting mauled by fans in London. Scorcese culls footage from Dylan's 1961-1966 performances and press conferences, and interviews the ever cryptic icon. What emerges, despite Dylan's best efforts at obfuscation, is a portrait of the artist broader than D.A. Pennebaker's Don't Look Back (1967), yet more focused than Todd Haynes' I'm Not There.

NoMa screenings are held Wednesdays, 7 p.m.-midnight, on the large grassy lot on L Street between 2nd and 3rd Streets NE, one block from the New York Avenue Metro station. Series highlights include I Am Trying to Break Your Heart (on July 8) and Dig! (July 29).