Lost In Translation Reviews
Top CriticLost in Translation revels in contradictions. It's a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road.
Very much a mood piece, the film's deft balance of humor and poignancy makes it both a pleasurable and melancholy experience.
With this film it becomes clear that Sofia Coppola is a filmmaker with eyes all her own.
So far as the central relationship goes, the film is almost European in its subtlety and nuance. Cinematic cherry blossom.
[Murray] can still do more with a raised eyebrow than anyone since Groucho Marx, but he's mellower and sometimes slightly poignant.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
In Japan, the most extreme delicacy goes hand in hand with garishness, and Coppola offers up both for our delectation. It's a heady, hallucinatory combo.
Of course, Mr. Murray gets all the laughs with his exquisite timing and wry delivery, but Ms. Johansson makes an eloquent and charismatic listener.
A gemlike movie that's intimate and moody but never sentimental.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Murray has never been better than he is here, but then he's never had a part that fit him so well, either.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Textured, thoughtful and touching.
| Original Score: A
There is real magic afoot in Lost in Translation -- the sort that is created not at the wave of a wizard's wand, but by the coming together of two wayward souls.
| Original Score: 4/4
In Lost in Translation, [Murray] emerges as a complete character -- honourable and venal, fallible and funny, adding vulnerability to the panache.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Although Translation is only [Coppola's] second feature, she already shows signs of being a sensei, as the Japanese call a master.
| Original Score: 4/4
How instinctively we react -- and connect -- when a film captures a feeling that is all too common, and all too real.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Think of Lost in Translation as a beautifully told short story. It doesn't have the resonance or heft of a good novel, but it's slyly seductive and intensely moody.
| Original Score: A-
How to sing the praises of Lost in Translation without drowning out its subtle pleasures?
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It's a wonderful film, all subtlety and grace, from the delicate script of writer-director Sofia Coppola to the finely tuned efforts of Bill Murray, who gives a still, laconic yet mesmerizing performance.
| Original Score: 5/5
Lost in Translation is a fortunate encounter between a young talent on the rise and an old pro still hitting his stride.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
By the end of Lost in Translation, we don't know much about Japan, but we know a lot more about the human condition.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Sofia Coppola's stealthy romance about two Americans stranded in Tokyo is a work of marvelous delicacy -- and offers the performance of Bill Murray's career.
Coppola, an assured and confident young filmmaker, has crafted a small poem, about being lost and being found.
| Original Score: 3.5/4
[Coppola] gives us a film so poignant, so funny, so free of self-satisfied bravado, that one can't help but look forward to her next work.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
The old adage says that poetry is what's lost in translation, but the poetry is all that survives in Sofia Coppola's wispy art film.
Sublimely romantic and subtle.
| Original Score: 4/4
Sweet and sad at the same time it is sardonic and funny.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
It allows Scarlett Johansson to arrive as an actress at the same time it finally gives Bill Murray the great role that has always eluded him.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
If Murray has an imposing corner on the comic dynamism in this movie, Johansson is no less compelling for her mysticism, self-assurance and charm.
A smartly written, confidently directed film that delivers big laughs while developing two of the year's most earnest characters and some of its most rewarding sentiments.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
It gets at something exquisitely human.
One of the purest and simplest examples ever of a director falling in love with her star's gifts.
Full Review
| Original Score: 5/5
Tart and sweet, unmistakably funny and exceptionally well observed.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The joys of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation come from watching Murray modify his trademark passive- aggressive style into played-straight comic bewilderment -- and to marvel at his slim new picture- of-health appearance.
It's certainly edgier, smarter, than much of what passes for culture-clash comedy these days, even if the phlegmatic Murray sometimes resembles every Ugly American abroad, mocking waiters and sushi chefs who struggle to get his deadpan humor.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
Remarkably sophisticated, honest, consistently hilarious and very real.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Mysterious and complex, as it muses bittersweetly on marriage, longing and the disconnectedness one can feel from another culture or people.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
This study into the unfathomable depths of human relationships has more honesty than 95% of the movies I have seen this year.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Exquisite study in emotional and geographical dislocation.
Full Review
| Original Score: A
Coppola -- who wrote as well as directed -- gives Murray room to stretch and is rewarded with some remarkably melancholy clowning.
Johansson is lovely and funny and sarcastic and sincere, and Murray is nothing short of great.
In only her second feature, Coppola has made a poised, intelligent film that nicely balances laughs with a poignancy rarely seen in American movies.
