The Aviator Reviews
Top CriticThis handsome movie is an oddly well-behaved one to come from the preternaturally energetic Scorsese.
This almost-great epic has one foot in legend: it's a vision of an American titan that could have sprung from the insides of Hughes's own obsessive, perfectionist head.
Despite a pacy, technically brilliant but otherwise slightly ordinary first half-hour or so, Scorsese's Howard Hughes movie is his best since The Age of Innocence.
Its primary appeal is its speed: It rushes along, from scandal to air crash to movie romance to Senate hearing, each anecdote well realized but never tarried over.
This undoubtedly is the movie Scorsese set out to make, and he made it exceedingly well. Still, we can fault him for choosing to celebrate its subject instead of examining him.
By and large I think this movie's chief function is to give Scorsese an opportunity to indulge in the pleasures of big-time filmmaking and to treat the audience to a heady dose of glamour.
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| Original Score: 3/4
We may enjoy watching the spectacles, but we don't much care for, or even have a feeling for, the guy in the cockpit.
While we leave the film without much more of an understanding of Hughes' legendary obsessions than we did upon entering, we nonetheless leave with a sense of having been glamorously, thoroughly entertained -- which, these days, is a rare pleasure.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
A film that's extremely well-made but tantalizingly or clumsily (take your pick) oblique.
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| Original Score: 3/4
It's history and biography and, as Scorsese, Logan and Orson Welles before them affirm, a distinctly American story.
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| Original Score: 5/5
For all the madness and tragedy in The Aviator, this is very much a movie that believes in crazy dreams, in reaching and recklessness and accomplishment.
| Original Score: A
A fast-moving, entertaining movie that boasts a fine performance by DiCaprio, who captures Hughes' brio, as well as the sadness that accompanied the gradual onset of insanity that turned Hughes into a legendary recluse.
| Original Score: A-
Hughes is the conduit for a titan of moviemaking to meditate gloriously on the power of film and flight to transform a nation, a culture, a world.
Sumptuously exciting, glowing with expertise, seething with life, gorgeously designed and thrillingly articulated.
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| Original Score: 4/4
What a sad man. What brief glory. What an enthralling film, 166 minutes, and it races past.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The first half -- covering Hughes's high-flying Hollywood years -- is an incredibly filmed treat.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Scorsese has crafted a luxurious entertainment that goes down like a flute of sparkling, silky champagne.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Makes a credible, and often thrilling case that Hughes' greatest creation was the idea of the man who could do anything, but does far less well when rolling in the muck with those who would rather see a crash than a new plateau achieved.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Other Scorsese films have carried more passion, but none has so brilliantly captured a lost era, or a lost American icon.
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| Original Score: 4.5/5
Scorsese's most accomplished, most disciplined movie since GoodFellas.
| Original Score: 3/4
A famous subject. A talented star. A script that combines spectacular special effects with an intimate look at a man slipping into madness. A master filmmaker back at the top of his game.
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| Original Score: 4/4
It's a wonderful showcase for Scorsese's passion for making movies, which, in a sense, parallels the passion Hughes had for making movies.
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| Original Score: B+
Few biopics with this kind of crazy scope have ever been so seamless.
The result is an admirably bumpy ride of a biopic, a rare one that leaves you feeling not safe but bracingly unsettled.
A compelling and occasionally stirring movie experience.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
It's stylish and fleet, and even though it's meticulously detailed, Scorsese's devotion to technique never weighs it down.
Someone is going to have to prove to me that those events occurred in that order. Watching The Aviator, I didn't buy a minute of it.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Another director would have made an uplifting picture about a great American success. Scorsese, instead, has made the only picture he could, risking studio millions on an intensely personal epic about a dark, complicated failure.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
Unfortunately, though it may finally gain an Oscar for director Martin Scorsese, it is not his best work. The movie is disappointingly flat.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The movie equivalent of a lavish coffee-table book, a love letter to the Golden Age of Hollywood from one of its foremost students.
| Original Score: 3/4
Scorsese's mournful celebration of Hughes's life from the 1920s to the late 1940s could be called Citizen Pain.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The Aviator is the perfect melding of talent and material.
The first and third hours of this 20th-century epic are as dazzling as big-scale movies get.
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| Original Score: 4/4
Tainted or not, Hughes' life was a remarkable one, and, flawed or not, Scorsese's film version deserves the same accolade.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Martin Scorsese's biography of the famously eccentric empire builder Howard Hughes is visually sumptuous if disappointingly hollow.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Mostly pays lip service to Hughes' demons, though it does make charged American-movie poetry out of his dreams.
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| Original Score: B
Sexy, inspiring and exhilarating, but perhaps more importantly, it's a generous portrait of a brave man, perhaps an artist, certainly a fractured genius.
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| Original Score: 4/4
A big, juicy, gorgeous, high-flying epic.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Superbly demonstrates, with abundant humor and obvious sympathy, that this very odd bird once soared on golden wings.
The Aviator could've been a Raging Bull brother film, given that masterpiece's crystalline purity of purpose and humiliated courage. But it brakes far short.
A good, but not great, filmed biography, and continues Scorsese's recent flirtation with mediocrity.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Mr. Scorsese is a great director who often fails, but you have to give him credit for always being on the prowl for new and demanding subjects, even when the results are disastrous, and for remaining true to his own vision, even when it is not shared.
I believe this is now the front runner for best picture of 2004.
Scorsese has crafted a rip-roaringly gorgeous-looking, beautifully acted biographical epic that is certain to garner Oscar nominations across the board.
An enormously entertaining slice of biographical drama.
