I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

One of the worst ways to make a cult movie is to set out to make a cult movie.

Went into it having delayed many years of "saving up". Because dir. Scorsese and actor starring is Leo.Turns out it's quite a boring pic, none of Scorsese's flair is really demonstrated, Leo seemed to pull some very familiar faces that reminded me more of him in other works than a convincing Howard Hughes (ESPECIALLY) lacking the Texas drawl. The 20s vibe was played up but doesn't interest me much at all. The flight CGI scenes were terrible (both looking painfully cgi and the flight paths behaving very uncharacteristically- blame my too many hours in war thunder). The scars post accident didn't look very good.Katharine Hepburn's actress was extremely good.

People with serious OCD issues are going to agree here, Lead character is not maintained to that and other kind of psychological problems.Film makers lost on that area particularly, otherwise it could get 10 stars from me, but 8 stars as depiction of that side of Howard (Lead character) was not very well done.

I really wish there was an option for zero stars because this garbage is that bad. It is so boring that at the end of the film you have to check your pulse to make sure you have not died of boredom. How the budget for this film was so high is beyond me since two hours of it takes place in a single room with barely any dialogue. The movie drags, drags, drags, and just when you think there is light at the end of the tunnel and that it is over it drags on long. It is almost three hours of absolutely painful torture. This is hands down the absolute worst film I have ever seen. The film is about Howard Hughs and his OCD, but even as someone with OCD myself I still could not appreciate any of this. (And his case was portrayed to be very extreme by the way.) There was absolutely no reason for this movie to drag on for three hours it could have been wrapped up in an hour and a half. It drags on since it is supposed to be a "masterpiece" but it is horrible. Hands down this is one of the absolute worst and torturous movies I have ever had to sit through. Terrible

Can the outsized ambition of one of Hollywood's biggest legends smash Hollywood convention and make a picture for the ages? How about two legends, then? Star Leonardo DiCaprio and director Martin Scorsese give it a ride, anyway.Howard Hughes inherited a lot of money and a fear of germs. Enjoying the first before the second tears him apart, he sets about making a movie that runs up seven-figure bills in 1927, then scraps it and remakes it for sound. "Hell's Angels" turns out quite a hit, but Hughes has already moved on to other passions, building experimental planes and bedding Hollywood starlets. Sure it sounds like fun, but can he survive the crash landings?One of his lovers, Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett), puts it this way: "There's too much Howard Hughes in Howard Hughes. That's the trouble."That's the trouble with "The Aviator," too. Taking a 20-year wedge of Hughes' life that incorporated everything from round-the-world flights to building a transcontinental airline, the movie struggles for a focus. In a five-minute span, we see Hughes design a monoplane, take Jean Harlow to a film premiere, and found a future mega-business, Hughes Aircraft. Scorsese is in a hurry to dazzle you with overlit sequences and fuzzy CGI.DiCaprio's ascension to the ranks of Hollywood's elite seems to have been the true focus of this film. He's fine, too, shedding his youthful image with an eerie approximation of Hughes' Texas drawl that is equal parts authority and anxiety. I just felt there were times when too much of the director's attention was on having Leo do an acting clinic and show the Oscar people something. He's best here working off other people, namely Alan Alda as a nasty senator named Brewster set on bringing Hughes down.Alda was nominated for an Oscar; Blanchett won one, either her first or Hepburn's fifth. It's a clenched, tinny performance, i. e. true to life and hard to take for more than a few minutes at a time. Fortunately, Kate/Cate makes an early exit, albeit not soon enough for me. What was the point of her character, anyway? If she's supposed to represent Hughes' truest object of desire, she doesn't have the air-speed velocity.The film does improve as it goes on, reversing the Hughes experience in life. The climax is a hearing held by Brewster in which both Alda and DiCaprio show how good this film might have been had it cut out the starlets and the flying montages and just gotten to the part where Hughes takes on the country and Pan-American Airways while his growing mental issues gnaw away at him. Watching Brewster switch from wolf to sheep as Hughes finds his footing is a joy.Even in this section, though, Scorsese spends long minutes on DiCaprio raging and writhing alone in the nude in order to let us know he's really suffering, not trusting his actor to show us the same thing in numerous small moments where the story is being advanced as well. The film is never boring, just muddled and straining at a significance it doesn't reach. Like one of Hughes' most famous creations, the giant airplane nicknamed the "Spruce Goose" which "The Aviator" climaxes with, what you have here is an overloaded creation that struggles to get in the air, and doesn't stay up long.