I had a very mixed opinion on THE AVIATOR. There are some dazzling sequences including the HELL'S ANGELS dogfight filming which I thought was as accomplished as anything Scorsese has ever filmed. That and some other sequences worked very, very well.
The thing that irritated me the most was the casting of Cate Blanchette. Now, I think she's a talented actress, and she certainly had Hepburn's voice and physical manner down (for the most part; there were slips in her accent that no one seems to have caught). But, I'm sorry, nothing personal but Katharine Hepburn was a beauty in the 1930s, and Cate Blanchette is a fairly homely-looking woman and no match for the really striking appearance that Katharine Hepburn made on film. Lots of people think of the rawer appearance of Hepburn from middle age, but she was (to my gay eyes at least) a gorgeous woman back then. Alongside the baby-faced DiCaprio, Cate looked almost like his mother, and I never believed them as a couple for a second.
I also thought the script was a mess. I found it very unsatisfying to show us Hughes' manias with some simplistic mother-son washing/discussion from his youth as the only explanation of their foundation. I wanted more explanation or investigation into his phobias, and I didn't get it.