Hugo

Running time: 127 minutes.

Rated: PG (mild thematic material, some action/peril, and smoking).

In “Hugo,’’ an exhilarating tale of magic, machines, memories, and dreams, Martin Scorsese pulls off the neatest trick of all. He marshals the marvels of modern movie technology - up to and including the dreaded 3-D - to create a love letter to the earliest of movies and, by extension, to every movie from then to now. Yes, “Hugo’’ is a family film and, yes, your children and your inner child stand to be enraptured, but the family Scorsese really made this for is the 100-year-old tribe of watchers in the dark.

“Hugo’’ is based on Brian Selznick’s 2007 young-adult novel “The Invention of Hugo Cabret,’’ an extraordinary work of imagination. Half prose, half gorgeously detailed pencil drawings, it tells the tale of an orphaned boy hiding in the walls of a Paris railway station in the late 1920s, winding its many clocks, as his late father and drunken uncle have instructed him. A broken mechanical man his father rescued from a museum leads Hugo to the aged proprietor of the station’s toy stall and to secrets the old man would prefer to forget.

Scorsese, screenwriter John Logan, and an army of sympathetic technicians bring the book off the page and into the realm of digitally amplified movie reality. The train station is a breathing, hyperrealistic world unto itself, the many passengers rushing through and never noticing the society that roots there: the pretty florist (Emily Mortimer) and wise bookseller (Christopher Lee), the officious station inspector (Sacha Baron Cohen) with his bright-blue uniform and creaking leg brace.

Hugo (Asa Butterfield) is the ghost in this machine, popping out to swipe a brioche and ducking back in to wind the gears and keep the trains on time.

All he has left of his father (a briefly seen Jude Law) is the mysterious automaton, and the cantankerous toy-seller Papa George (Ben Kingsley) threatens that. But Papa George has a young adopted daughter named Isabelle (Chloë Grace Moretz) who decides to help Hugo out - she reads books and is craving her own adventure - and the two begin connecting the dots that lead to Papa George’s past.