Country: USA & Japan
Language: English, Japanese, German & French
Runtime: 102 minutes
BBFC: 15
MPAA: R
Original Release: 3rd October 2003 (USA)
UK Release: 9th January 2004
First Seen: DVD, c.2004
Stars
Bill Murray (Ed Wood, Broken Flowers)
Scarlett Johansson (Ghost World, Under the Skin)
Giovanni Ribisi (Gone in Sixty Seconds, Avatar)
Anna Faris (Scary Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs)
Director
Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring)
Screenwriter
Sofia Coppola (Marie Antoinette, Somewhere)
The Story
In Tokyo to shoot a lucrative whiskey commercial, one-time movie star Bob Harris battles with middle-aged ennui. In his hotel he encounters Charlotte, a recent Yale graduate who’s tagged along with her entertainment photographer husband, and feels similarly untethered by life. Perhaps these two lost souls will find something in each other…
Our Heroes
“I just feel so alone, even when I’m surrounded by other people,” says Charlotte, succinctly assessing the life situation of not only herself, but also her new friend, Bob. He’s dryly amused by the world (who better than Bill Murray for that role?), struggling to connect with his wife back home who pesters him with questions about carpet colours. Charlotte, unsure what to do with her life after graduating from university, and finding her husband and his acquaintances to not be on her level, is a kindred spirit, despite the age gap.
Our Villain
Not strictly a villain, but Charlotte’s husband is hardly the most inspiring figure in her life. Not a strong basis for a marriage, really.
Best Supporting Character
A lady known only as Premium Fantasy Woman. “My stockings. Lip them. Lip my stockings. Yes, please, lip them… Lip them. Hey! Lip my stocking!”
Memorable Quote
“Let’s never come here again because it would never be as much fun.” — Charlotte
Memorable Scene
After an exuberant night out, Bob and Charlotte sit quietly side by side in a karaoke joint’s hallway. She slowly lowers her head on to his shoulder, smiling to herself, while he stares into the distancing, participating in the moment but also not. To quote further from my ‘What the Public Say’ selection, “it expresses the connection, and simultaneously, the quiet distance that still exists between them (mostly in their minds). It’s romantic without really consuming the romance.”
Making of
Bill Murray no longer has an agent, instead maintaining a voicemail number that he rarely gives out. Sofia Coppola reportedly left hundreds of messages on it, having written the part of Bob especially for him. Eventually he called her back, but still only gave a verbal commitment to appear — she wasn’t sure he was actually going to show until the first day of filming, when he did.
Awards
1 Oscar (Original Screenplay)
3 Oscar nominations (Picture, Actor (Bill Murray), Director)
3 BAFTAs (Actor (Bill Murray), Actress (Scarlett Johansson), Editing)
5 BAFTA nominations (Film, Director, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Music)
FIPRESCI Prize (to Sofia Coppola for “the cool detachment and freshness with which she observes the antics of various American and Japanese television and communication industry people in the anonymous surroundings of a large Japanese city, and for the sensitivity with which she modulates the atmosphere of the film from comedy to melancholy.”)
1 MTV Movie Awards Mexico nomination (Funniest American in Japan — it lost to Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai)
What the Critics Said
“Lost in Translation revels in contradictions. It’s a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road. Sofia Coppola has a witty touch with dialogue that sounds improvised yet reveals, glancingly, her characters’ dislocation. She’s a real mood weaver, with a gift for […] mining a comic’s deadpan depths. Watch Murray’s eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status quo. You won’t find a subtler, funnier or more poignant performance this year than this quietly astonishing turn.” — Richard Corliss, TIME
Score: 
95%What the Public Say
“It’s an incredibly quiet film, with little narrative or story-related dialogue. We follow Bob and Charlotte as they gently explore their environment and grow towards each other, and it feels like we’re watching seaturtles swim together. It’s all very graceful and beautiful, and quiet, and meandering, and slow. And I mean that in a good way […] For a film that explores disconnection and loneliness, to me there is no better way to frame that story.” — Reinout van Schie, One Shot
There seems to have been a glut of “men coming to terms with their place in the world”-type movies in the early ’00s, for whatever reason. (I’m not sure there was before that? There have been plenty since, though they can feel like hangers-on.) Some once-popular ones have turned into objects of derision (Garden State), but I think others hold up. No doubt the quality of the BAFTA-winning performances of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson have a lot to do with that, creating a cross-generational pairing of two lost souls that feels real and touching, rather than tipping into some creepy love affair thing. Nonetheless, through to its ending the film plays with variations on melancholy — a difficult feeling to evoke in movies, in my opinion, but a level writer-director Sofia Coppola here hits with impressive consistency.
#57 will be… Denzel Washington in flames.
Thirteen-year-old Lili (Zsófia Psotta) and her dog Hagen are forced to temporarily live with her father, Dániel (Sándor Zsótér), because her mother is going on holiday with her new partner. Dániel doesn’t like Hagen anyway, but when the dog’s behaviour causes problems for him, he sets Hagen loose on the streets. Already angry with her father and his attitude, a devastated Lili sets out to find her beloved dog, who is busy discovering the darker side of mankind and our treatment of animals.
For all the toughness of the journey, where it leads is triumphant; not entirely so, I must add, but enough. The film’s third act can pithily be described as Rise of the Planet of the Dogs: having seen the abuses of humans, an impounded Hagen leads a canine uprising that seeks to… well, they don’t speak (they’re dogs, remember, and this isn’t Disney), so who knows what their precise aims are? “Revenge” would be too cruel, but they definitely seeking some retribution. The film’s sadness doesn’t disappear (hence why not entirely triumphant), but some wrongs are righted.
Some will find the middle of the film a slog, I suspect, both emotionally and with its occasionally lagging pace. However, the bookends seek to justify it. There’s catharsis in the finale, as described, but even better is the film’s opening. It has to be seen to be properly understood, but it’s operatically scored, shot, and edited, and involves hundreds (literally) of trained dogs en masse. It’s spectacular, unforgettable moviemaking; perhaps even one of the best openings to a film ever. And I don’t say that just as a “dog person”.
Mia Wasikowska stars opposite a British thesp best known for playing a comic book villain and a red-headed repeat-Oscar-nominee, in a Gothic drama-thriller from an acclaimed non-Anglo director? That’s a description of 
The story actually concerns Edith Cushing (Wasikowska), a well-to-do businessman’s daughter in upstate New York who is occasionally haunted by ghosts. She falls for visiting English gent Sir Thomas Sharpe (Hiddleston) and, long story short, moves with him and his haughty sister Lucille (Chastain) back to their crumbling — literally — pile in the English countryside. The house hides many secrets, and ghosts, too. Having said it’s not a horror movie, it would be unfair to class Crimson Peak as simply a tame drama — as you’d expect from writer-director Guillermo del Toro, those ghosts can be bleedin’ scary, and there are certainly a smattering of good old fashioned jumps to boot.
Whatever one’s thoughts on the story and tone of the film, it can’t be denied that its technical merits are extraordinary. Every inch of the design work is gloriously imagined, and the cinematography — the lighting in particular — is spectacular. And that gigantic house set…! And the climactic ‘limbo’ set, too — incredible work. (That’s not a spoiler, incidentally: it was the set’s nickname, not its literal location.) The ghost effects are excellent too — original, creepy, and executed in a way that blurs the lines between make-up, animatronics, and CGI. It’s a shame the film as a whole wasn’t better received, because I imagine that’s all that held it back from numerous awards-season nods.
The same summer that Christopher Nolan revitalised the Dark Knight with the critically acclaimed and commercially successful 
All of that was ten years ago now, since when plans for a sequel have been abandoned, the character has had 
often for good reason, but (a) sometimes a new telling is the right way to go, and (b) if you’re going to pick up a character mid-life, you still need to treat it as a new and standalone story if its immediate predecessor was released decades ago.
that actually takes up the first half-hour-or-so. I can imagine an edit of the movie that begins on that plane: just a bunch of journalists observing the press demonstration of the new shuttle technology, when suddenly, inexplicably, it fails — they’re all going to die — then Superman turns up completely out of nowhere and saves them. Then you have the credits, which are immediately followed by Lex’s whole journey to the Fortress of Solitude, and only then do you get in to the stuff with Superman only having just returned, wondering what his places is now, and so on. Maybe lose the scene of him basically stalking Lois’ new family, though.
The final thing this all makes me think of is the forthcoming Marvel Spidey movie, 
Disney’s animated classic is re-imagined in live-action, losing the songs but expanding the story. The latter serves to find a little more realism in the setup (how Cinders became a servant to her stepmother, etc), as well as in the characters’ motivations and actions.
The cinema was blessed — or, depending on your point of view, blighted — by an abundance of espionage-related movies last year (see: the intro to 
that usually just means an overabundance of the F-word. Here we have at least one clear headshot, a dissolving throat, a knife through a hand, and more photos of a henchman’s penis than you ever needed to see. (That last one’s only describable as “gruesome” depending on your personal predilections, of course.)
The extended (aka unrated) cut contains almost 10 minutes of extra material, detailed 
