In his review of Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo” in the magazine this week, David Denby writes, “No other work of art has demonstrated so explicitly how gears, springs, shutters, wheels, and tracks can generate wonders.” I think it’s a tie. There’s a miraculous moment in one of the all-time great DVD supplements—a segment from Jacques Rivette’s 1967 film “Jean Renoir, The Boss,” featured on the second disk of Criterion’s release of “The Rules of the Game”—in which Renoir cites the shot he considers the best he ever made, which is from that 1939 film: the tracking shot of the massive music machine of the Marquis de la Cheyniest (Marcel Dalio) that ends with the aristocrat himself, presenting his prize possession to his assembled guests with pride and humility—pride in his taste and humility before its object, pride in his possession of the fabulous contrivance, and humility before its invention.
— Richard Brody talks about Hugo in The New Yorker.
