Director: Martin Scorsese

Cast: Asa Butterfield, Ray Winstone, Sacha Baron Cohen, Chloe Moretz, Ben Kingsley

ROMANTICS will always be susceptible to the charms of Paris, and Hugo offers, in the splendour of 3D, a more seductive vision than most.

This is Paris in the snowy winter of 1931, a city in which elegance is seasoned with a delicious hint of squalor, and steam trains rattle in and out of one of its majestic stations.

There, in the station's walls, is a secret apartment inhabited by a 12-year-old orphan called Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield).

He lives alone, since his beloved father (Jude Law) died and his drunken uncle Claude (Ray Winstone) - whose job it was to wind up the station clocks, and who first trained him in the task - disappeared.

Now Hugo diligently winds the clocks himself to avoid any troublesome investigations of his uncle's whereabouts, pilfers croissants, and dodges the fearsome, comic Station Inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen), who dispatches unaccompanied minors to the dreaded orphanage.

The boy has one obsession, a gleaming automaton - or early robot - which his father rescued from a museum, and which he is attempting to restore with parts stolen from a crotchety gentleman, Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley), who sells clockwork toys.

When he is caught thieving, it leads to an encounter with the shop-owner's god-daughter (Chloe Moretz), who befriends him. At times the story itself drifts gently off-course, while Scorsese gives surreal and glorious rein.

Many images are self-consciously cinematic, homages to the great set-pieces of the early directors. Adapted from Brian Selznick's best-selling novel, Hugo is a wonderfully nostalgic film, and its magic will touch all ages.