The Aviator

Francis Ford Coppola had Preston Tucker, Oliver Stone had Alexander the Great, and now Martin Scorsese has the bold, mercurial Howard Hughes, who saw movies, planes and impossibly cantilevered actresses as exemplars of the same lust for quintessence: the fastest planes, the curviest women, the most spectacular movies, bold hedges against his own shredding mind. After a brief prologue locating Hughes' lifelong neuroses in his mother's suffocating attentions, the film focuses on the 20 years between 1927 — when Hughes was hip-deep in making aviation drama HELL'S ANGELS (1930) — and his 1947 trial by the Senate War Investigating Committee. The heir to an enormous drill-...