Real-life stories don’t get much more improbable, inspirational, and death-defying than that of French high-wire artist Philppe Petit, who on August 7, 1974 strung a cable (illegally, with the help of accomplices) between the two towers of the then-unfinished World Trade Center and danced for 45 minutes among the clouds for onlookers over 100 stories below. James Marsh’s 2008 documentary Man On Wire beautifully recounts the feat, which took an inordinate amount of preparation (training, trespassing, reconnaissance, recruiting) to pull off. Petit and his team’s accomplishment is the stuff of legend, and Marsh’s film is one of my very favorites.

A narrative version of the tale was inevitable, and it now arrives in the form of Robert Zemeckis‘ The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the uncontrollably charismatic Petit. The movie has its merits: the final 30 minutes, in which we see Gordon-Levitt’s Petit preen and twirl in the sky as aggravated police officers try to snatch him from either end of the cable, is an exhilarating piece of filmmaking that you won’t find in Marsh’s documentary and must be watched in a theater, in 3-D. It’s a high note to end on, but the road to get there is so unremarkable and stale that it makes it difficult to exalt the movie as a whole.

The most wonderful thing about Man On Wire was Petit, who told his own story not just with his words, but with his whole body. Zemeckis and co-writer Christopher Browne chose to grab for that same magic by having Gordon-Levitt narrate the film, addressing the audience directly, from atop the Statue of Liberty. They find mixed success: the symbolism of the fantastical New York City image has a nice poetry to it (the statue’s history isn’t insignificant here), but Gordon-Levitt doesn’t come close enough to capturing the vigor and wild ambition of the real-life Petit. To be fair, I’m not sure any actor could.

Most of Gordon-Levitt’s work has been good-to-excellent, but this is one role he just doesn’t seem to fit into completely. His attempt at a French accent is valiant but shoddy, and while he’s certainly energetic and wide-eyed, he doesn’t exude the same raw passion of his real-life counterpart. It’s a good performance and serves the story well, but he’s capable of much, much more.

In flashbacks inspired by the greatest hits of the French New Wave, we find Petit wowing small crowds as a Parisienne street performer. A magic trick involving a sizeable jawbreaker sends him to the dentist’s office, where his life work begins: he sees a picture of the under-construction World Trade Center and in an instant devotes his life to them. He’s got a lover, Annie (Charlotte Le Bon), and some friends who are willing to help him on his quest, but he seeks additional guidance from a master wire-walker, played by Ben Kingsley.

The movie’s most unbelievable elements—the eponymous walk, the heist-like operation of infiltrating the buildings, Petit’s zany personality—are all true to life. The story is that extraordinary. But Zemeckis’ approach, while inspired, actually dulls the spectacle of the lead-up to the final act. Visually, he views the world through Petit’s child-like eyes, depicting France in a heightened, nostalgic state. Once he gets to New York City, the impossibility of Petit’s dream dawns on him and the movie goes gray in a hurry. It’s a poetic device, but there are flaws in execution. In France, everything feels too Hollywood-y and fluffy, and in New York City, things get a little too drab and depressing. The balance in tone feels off, and a few tweaks in calibration may have evened things out and made for a smoother transition.

If you buy your movie ticket for The Walk, make sure you shell out the extra dough for those infernal 3-D glasses. In this case, they make the movie. The grand finale is absolutely terrifying, especially with the added depth of the 3-D effect. When Gordon-Levitt takes his first step onto that cable hung thousands of feet in the air and the camera points straight down at the tiny streets and buildings below, it’s an incredible feeling. It’s not as touching a moment as you’ll find in Man On Wire or Petit’s written account of the stunt, To Reach the Clouds, but you can’t deny the view.

Be warned: The Walk may trigger latent cases of acrophobia. This thrilling, spine-tingling adventure portrays Phillippe Petit’s daring high-wire walk between the Twin Towers, as previously depicted in James Marsch’s Oscar-winning documentary Man on Wire. Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) unleashes the full might of his CGI prowess into recreating the skyline of 1970s New York City, as well as placing his affable cast atop the North and South Towers. The vividness of those visuals don’t completely mask The Walk‘s staid script or one-note characterizations, but in spite of its flaws, Zemeckis’ latest is a fun, suspenseful experience.

Chronicling Petit’s journey from aspirational French performance artist to the determined obsessive he becomes, The Walk plows through story beats in thinly constructed short scenes. These early moments, featuring excessive step-by-step narration from Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Petit (presumably doing his best Pepe Le Pew impression), are far duller than what will follow. Zemeckis’ talent for visual flair occasionally transforms the mundanity of an origins story into showcase set pieces. As a young Petit walks across a series of ropes tied between trees, those ropes break off one by one and fall away until Zemeckis’ camera pans up to reveal Petit as a man.

It’s in the final sequences, leading up to and on the rooftop, where The Walk begins to soar. Petit and his gang’s ascent up the towers resembles a heist movie. Complimented by the tapping of bongos and jazzy brass instruments, the crew don disguises and persuade guards in order to reach the building’s 110th floor. Watching the tightrope walker take his first steps out into the open air, swooping around in full circles to reveal the breathtaking views of New York, it’s hard to not simply marvel at the creation. You worry that Petit might fall—even with the knowledge that he won’t. This exhilarating section supersedes the rest of the film—though not as significantly as the opening of Flight does to the rest of that movie—but the journey to the top is peppered with enough cleverness to make the trip enjoyable. The view up there is unlike any other.

As actors, Patricia Clarkson and Ben Kingsley have bottomless resources. They’re two of the best working today, and Learning to Drive is simply a vehicle for them to pilot smoothly toward the finish line. It’s really nothing more than that; the lead performances are extraordinary, but the script, the imagery, the sound—every other element—is decidedly ordinary. Director Isabel Coixet and screenwriter Sarah Kernochan paint New York City from an ignorant tourist’s point of view as it weaves a rudimentary tale of a vehophobic book critic named Wendy (Clarkson), who’s just been dumped by her husband, and her noble Sikh driving instructor, Darwan (Kingsley), who’s determined to teach her how to grab life by the wheel. It’s thin, copacetic material (the source material, a short story by Katha Pollitt, has more edge), but it lays enough of a foundation to allow Clarkson and Kingsley to work.

At the outset, Wendy’s left alone in her Manhattan home by her asshole of a husband of 21 years (Jake Weber). They had a huge fight in the back of a cab the night before, and in the morning, the driver, Darwan, shows up on Wendy’s doorstep to return a package she left on the seat. She notices from the big-lettered advertisement on his cab that he doubles as a driving instructor, and she asks him to be her vehicular Jedi master of sorts.

A teacher-student friendship blossoms at a steady rate, with Wendy and Darwan using each other as a rock to cling to as the rapids of life threaten to wash them downstream. Wendy wants desperately to visit her daughter (Grace Gummer) in Vermont (especially with her impending divorce looming), but can’t clear her head of her husband’s memory, an obsession that inhibits her abilities behind the wheel (her mind drifts frequently as she daydreams about he and his new girlfriend). Darwan has a seemingly tighter grip on reality though he lives with complications of his own. A political refugee, he and his illegal-immigrant roommates are under constant threat of deportation. Making things more knotty is the fact that his sister has arranged for him to marry a complete stranger to gain her access into the U.S.; Darwan finds he has more affection for Wendy than his new wife.

The script isn’t flawed in any major way, but it’s resoundingly underwhelming. Its views of New Yorkers (Wendy) and immigrants (Darwan) are as one-dimensional as can be without being offensive though Clarkson and Kingsley do a lot of heavy lifting to give their characters more depth. There are actually several moments of delight in which the acting between them is so good and dynamic you almost forget about the artifice that is the movie around them. In fact, it sometimes feels like the actors abandon the cross-cultural themes completely as they get lost in playing off of one another. In these moments, it becomes woefully apparent that the heavy-handed driving metaphor Kernochan drives home so incessantly is nothing but a pestering distraction from the real work being done by Clarkson and Kingsley.

Learning to Drive has some sweetness to it, most of which comes from the compassion in Kingsley’s eyes. The thought of someone in a scrambled mental state such as Wendy’s getting behind the wheel of a car is terrifying for its dangerous implications. If only Coixet and Kernochan would flirt with danger a little more in their filmmaking, we could have had a more memorable film on our hands.

“Come and dream with me,” a character says a one point during Hugo, which would also have been a very appropriate way to begin the film. A story about a young orphan who lives at a train station trying to solve a mystery link to his father is not be a kind of film Martin Scorsese is used to doing, but it does not show. It is a film about dreams and magical realism adventures that is entertaining for both children and adults.

Set in Paris during the 1930’s at a train station where a young orphan boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) keeps the station clocks running. He learned how to fix clocks from his father before he passed away. In a way of honoring his memories, Hugo continues to fix clocks and other gadgets around the station.

One item in particular that reminds him most about his father is an automaton, a mechanical man his father received from a museum. Guided by an old journal of his father’s notes, Hugo tries to complete what his father and he were not able to do which is to get the automaton working again. Standing in his way is a special heart shaped key that Hugo must find in order to unlock a secret message the automaton is believed to have.

In order to get the parts needed for the automaton, Hugo steals gears and other equipment from a local station toy shopkeeper, Georges Melies (Ben Kingsley). Melies is an old grumpy man who finally catches Hugo stealing from him one day. He takes Hugo’s father’s book of notes from him and threatens to burn them.

Hugo follows Melies home and begs him not to burn his precious notes but the grumpy old man shows no sympathy. Hugo does manage to befriend Melies’ goddaughter, Isabelle (Chloe Moretz), who agrees to try to stop her godfather’s actions. The two form a friendship full of adventures and discovery as Isabelle shows Hugo the world of literature and he shows her the world of cinema.

They stumble upon a book about the pioneers of cinema such as Lumieres’ Arrival of a Train at the Station and read about how the audience literally jumped out of their seats while watching because they were afraid the train was going to hit them. They soon discover that Georges Melies was actually a legendary filmmaker which begins another discovery in which they find a link between Melies and Hugo’s father.

The second half of Hugo is really about paying respect to the history of cinema. Scorsese educates his viewers on the importance of Georges Melies’ legendary filmmaking career. Starting out as a French illusionist he turned to filmmaking as a way to display his technical special effects in a new medium. Clips from A Trip to the Moon are shown many times throughout the film.

2011 was a year in which the top two Oscar winners shared one major thing in common, they both paid tribute to the lost art of silent cinema. Both Hugo and The Artist showcase the extraordinary power of silent films and both illustrate the important influences from which films today came from. As I said when I reviewed The Artist, if you appreciate and are passionate about films you will appreciate this film.

This is the second Scorsese film in a row that Ben Kingsley stars in (the last one being Shutter Island) and Kingsley certainly does a great job with the role of Melies. The role demanded him to play a stiff old grumpy man whose days at being at the top are long behind him. Asa Butterfield is excellent as the lead in Hugo just as he was for his previous lead role in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. He is definitely a talented young actor as these two films confirm.

It only makes sense that a film that is largely about the preservation of old films was done by Martin Scorsese as he is a huge advocate of such thing in real life. In 1990 he founded a non-profit organization that is dedicated to film preservation called, The Film Foundation.

Hugo starts off more of a kid’s adventure film but ends up being more of a shrine to the beginning of film for adults. There are times were it was fairly predictable but considering it was aimed for all audiences it is not all that surprising. There are love stories mixed in with magical adventures as well as a history lesson in filmmaking all found in Hugo. It is an unconventional film for Martin Scorsese, one that truly shows his range as one of the best American directors of our time and it does not disappoint.