Contagion

A film which promises to kill off Gwyneth Paltrow after ten minutes is one that deserves to be watched – particularly when the rest of the cast consists of big hitters like Matt Damon, Jude Law, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard and the criminally underrated John Hawkes. Director Steve Soderbergh has marshalled such a talented ensemble to great success before: will Contagion emulate the success of Ocean’s Eleven or flop like its disastrous sequels?

The movie opens with a sweating, coughing business woman (Gwyneth Paltrow) returns from abroad to her husband and family in Minneapolis. She’s carrying a lethal virus picked up in China - and dropping in on her lover in Chicago en route she begins to spread the infection across the USA. The pandemic takes root, Paltrow dies and the Centre for Disease Control, World Health Organisation and Homeland Security are called in. The action jumps from location to location as the authorities attempt to prevent the outbreak’s spread and dampen the growing sense of international panic.

As you’d expect from Soderbergh, Contagion is extremely sick. Arguably its greatest strengths are kinetic sequences showing the transmission of the virus from one person to the next. Probably the greatest of these shows Paltrow’s character passing her infection around a busy casino: an environment the director has repeatedly proved himself comfortable in.

The human drama of the situation is dealt with less capably. Matt Damon tries manfully to inject some gravitas into his schlubby grieving father, but of the ensemble cast he’s the only one really worth caring about. This is the fault of an overly-ambitious storyline which simply attends to too many characters in too many locations. A tighter focus on a smaller number of stories would have allowed deeper explorations of the more interesting characters: an entire storyline concerning Marion Cotillard’s WHO inspector could easily be culled with no detrimental effect on the movie.

To be fair, Jude Law’s shifty medical blogger could quite easily have been cut out, too. He’s an irritant for both the authorities and the home audience – not least because of his dodgy and unnecessary Australian accent. If his role is to represent the world of technology and the way news (both true and false) spreads, then Soderbergh is over-egging the pudding. There are enough mentions of Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging as it is.

To be so critical of the film is perhaps a little unfair. It’s a thoroughly engaging watch and features some strong performances and some notable twists and turns. Sadly, it feels slightly episodic thanks to the separate story strands which are not tied together as neatly as they were in Soderbergh’s Crash. Still, there are worse ways to spend an evening than in the company of a cast like this in a thriller which resonates with an audience familiar with health scares like SARS and H1N1.

Hugo

"If you ever wondered where your dreams come from, you look around. This is where they're made."

Hugo is undoubtedly the biggest departure yet from Martin Scorsese’s familiar style. There are no wisecracking Italian gangsters, no blood spattered violence – not even a profanity. Instead, the legendary director has produced a nostalgic ode to the cinematic art featuring an ensemble cast of British characters with two children in the lead roles. And he pulls it off with aplomb.

Set in 1930s Parisian railway station, Hugo tells the tale of the titular hero – a young boy who lives in the walls of the steamy station in order to maintain the many clocks. He’s the orphaned son of a watchmaker who has inherited his father’s gift with machinery. As he struggles to repair a mechanical automaton he is forced to steal machine parts from the station’s resident toymaker Georges (brilliantly played by Ben Kingsley). When the curmudgeonly old man catches Hugo (Asa Butterfield) red-handed a mutually respectful relationship begins to develop – and as Georges’ hostilities towards Hugo thaw, his young ward Isobel (Chloe Moretz) strikes up a firm friendship with the orphaned boy.

As the two children go adventuring around cinemas, libraries and bookshops they realise that there might be a little more to Georges than meets the eye and set about uncovering the cause for the old man’s sadness. It’s a journey which teaches them about themselves and the art of cinema.

Hugo is a sumptuous film to look at. Designed with 3D in mind, Scorsese has pulled out all the visual stops here. Sadly, I only saw the 2D version thanks to the sheer uselessness of my local Vue (which isn’t even showing The Artist – I despair). It was still abundantly apparent just how stunning the visual effects would have been if I’d been wearing the appropriate goggles – although the film still works brilliantly in the more traditional format. Swooping cameras loop around the train station, huge cogs and gears grind and steam is emitted from every available opening. It’s a wonderful evocation of 30s Paris – aided brilliantly from the caricatures and characters who inhabit it. The likes of Christopher Lee, Richard Griffiths and Emily Mortimer breathe life into their slight characters marvellously – but they are all usurped by Sacha Baron Cohen’s peevish station inspector – and his Doberman.

Cleverly plotted (and beautifully played by the young leads), Hugo sees the children journey through the history of cinema via the Lumière brothers, the first motion picture shown in Paris and, ultimately, the iconic Georges Méliès. Scorsese’s admiration for his cinematic forefathers is plain and his retelling of their stories is visual poetry. Suffused with magic and fantasy, these nostalgic scenes are some of the finest the director has ever put on the screen. I was vaguely reminded of Prospero’s farewell to his art in The Tempest – let’s hope this isn’t Scorsese’s goodbye.