The Aviator does make for a rather fascinating and compelling stand-alone story about an industrious, fastidious, obsessive man...

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 8, 2019

Good but not great, and not for younger kids.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 28, 2010

This handsome movie is an oddly well-behaved one to come from the preternaturally energetic Scorsese.

| Feb 3, 2010

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.

| Nov 1, 2007

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.

| Jun 24, 2006

Scorsese gives us a lot more than the Charles Foster Kane of the clouds. He keeps focus on Hughes, the dreamer, who continually reached out, grabbed the future and pulled it toward him.

| Jan 17, 2006

It's a measure of The Aviator's complexity and ambiguity that it can be read equally as a celebration of rugged, capitalist individualism and as a leftist critique of cutthroat free-market competition.

| Sep 26, 2005

Beneath the glossy surface there's a niggling lack of depth, but otherwise this is a grand, impressive Tinseltown drama.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 25, 2005

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.

| May 20, 2005

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.

Full Review | Apr 21, 2005

DiCaprio remains a lightweight presence, a cherubic man-child who one could sooner imagine fiddling with an Airfix set and glue than spearheading the adventure of modern aviation.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Mar 7, 2005

You can almost feel Scorsese exorcising the specter of Gangs of New York in the first act.

| Original Score: B- | Feb 17, 2005

It's bravura, classic Hollywood filmmaking, and you like to think that Hughes himself would have viewed it, if not appreciatively, then at least with a sense of kinship.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 15, 2005

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.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Dec 27, 2004

We may enjoy watching the spectacles, but we don't much care for, or even have a feeling for, the guy in the cockpit.

| Dec 24, 2004

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 24, 2004

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.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Dec 24, 2004

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.

Full Review | Dec 24, 2004

Sumptuously exciting, glowing with expertise, seething with life, gorgeously designed and thrillingly articulated.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 24, 2004

What a sad man. What brief glory. What an enthralling film, 166 minutes, and it races past.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 24, 2004