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Lost in Translation

Universal acclaim
Based on 44 critic reviews
How did we calculate this?
Based on 475 votes
Read user comments
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Movie Info
Genre(s): Comedy | Drama | Romance
Written by: Sofia Coppola
Directed by: Sofia Coppola
Release Date:
Theatrical: September 12, 2003
DVD: February 3, 2004
Running Time: 105 minutes, Color
Origin: USA
Summary
RATING: R for some sexual content
Starring Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Giovanni Ribisi, and Anna Faris
Unable to sleep, Bob (Murray) and Charlotte (Johansson), two Americans in Tokyo, cross paths one night in the luxury hotel bar. This chance meeting soon becomes a surprising friendship. Charlotte and Bob venture through Tokyo, having often hilarious encounters with its citizens, and ultimately discover a new belief in life's possibilities. (Focus Features)
Also On Metacritic
FILM: Marie Antoinette The Virgin Suicides
Also On The Web: Internet Movie Database View The Trailer Official Studio Site
What The Critics Said
All critic scores are converted to a 100-point scale. If a critic does not indicate a score, we assign a score based on the general impression given by the text of the review. Learn more...
Entertainment Weekly Lisa Schwarzbaum
What's astonishing about Sofia Coppola's enthralling new movie is the precision, maturity, and originality with which the confident young writer-director communicates so clearly in a cinematic language all her own.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Scott Foundas
Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.
Read Full Review >LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Fraught with a deep sadness and sense of yearning. Yet, it is also an enormously -- at times, even uproariously -- comedic film, not because it feels any obligation to be "funny" in some contrived, screenwriterly sort of way, but because Coppola has set out to make a movie set to the rhythms of real (rather than reel) life.
Read Full Review >Los Angeles Times Kenneth Turan
The fact that this kind of serious material ends up playing puckishly funny as well as poignant is a tribute both to Coppola and to her do-or-die decision to cast Murray in the lead role.
Read Full Review >ReelViews James Berardinelli
Simply put, Sofia Copolla's Lost in Translation is an amazing motion picture.
Read Full Review >Premiere Glenn Kenny
This is one of the year's most subtly moving films, and a strong affirmation of Coppola's substantial talent.
Read Full Review >Seattle Post-Intelligencer Sean Axmaker
Isn't about a May-December romance or a brief encounter in a faraway place. It's about being alone in a crowd and the power of unexpected friendships.
Read Full Review >Chicago Sun-Times Roger Ebert
I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters.
Read Full Review >New York Post Lou Lumenick
It's impossible to conceive of this ruefully funny entertainment without Bill Murray, who is nothing less than brilliant.
Read Full Review >The New York Times A.O. Scott
Here he (Murray) supplies the kind of performance that seems so fully realized and effortless that it can easily be mistaken for not acting at all.
Read Full Review >Salon.com Stephanie Zacharek
The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of Lost in Translation, is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.
Read Full Review >Boston Globe Ty Burr
Longer on atmosphere and observation than on story, but you don't mind: Coppola maintains her quietly charged tone with a certainty that would be unbelievable in a second film if you didn't suspect genetics had a hand.
Read Full Review >San Francisco Chronicle Edward Guthmann
A delicate, beautifully observed study of impossible romance, Lost in Translation is one of the best films this year.
Read Full Review >Wall Street Journal Joe Morgenstern
Giddily funny in a singularly American idiom, and shot, by Lance Acord, with an eagle eye for cultural absurdities, Ms. Coppola's film is also a meditation on love and longing, shot through with a sensibility that's all the more surprising for being so unfashionably tender.
Portland Oregonian Shawn Levy
It's a bento box of shifts, feints, hints and small, sharp insights, built around a surprisingly deep core of feeling. And it confirms Coppola as an artist to watch and relish.
Read Full Review >Empire Rob Fraser
With cinemas dominated by underwhelming blockbusters and formulaic rom-coms, its easy to become disillusioned with the state of the movies. Thank the almighty, then, for Lost In Translation, which in 102 wondrous minutes will restore your faith in the power of the medium.
Read Full Review >The New Republic Stanley Kauffmann
Coppola handles her film with very pleasant economy, with a kind of warm precision. Her father, who was one of this picture's producers, can be as proud of her as we are grateful.
Read Full Review >Slate David Edelstein
This is the Bill Murray performance we've been waiting for: Saturday Night Live meets Chekhov.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Stephen Hunter
It gets at something exquisitely human, so human that even movie stars feel it.
Read Full Review >The Hollywood Reporter Kirk Honeycutt
The movie contains priceless slapstick from Bill Murray, finely tuned performances by Murray and the beautiful Scarlett Johansson and a visual and aural design that cultivates a romantic though melancholy mood.
Read Full Review >The Onion (A.V. Club) Nathan Rabin
Gorgeously shot by Lance Acord, who makes Toyko a gaudy dreamscape that's both seductive and frightening, Lost In Translation washes away memories of "Godfather III," establishing Coppola as a major filmmaker in her own right, and reconfirming Johansson and Murray as actors of startling depth and power.
Read Full Review >Village Voice J. Hoberman
As bittersweet a brief encounter as any in American movies since Richard Linklater's equally romantic "Before Sunrise."
Read Full Review >New York Magazine Peter Rainer
Coppola both wrote and directed, and theres a pleasing shapelessness to her scenes. She accomplishes the difficult feat of showing people being bored out of their skulls in such a way that we are never bored watching them.
Read Full Review >Time Richard Corliss
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.
Read Full Review >Newsweek David Ansen
Their (Murray/Johansson) brief, wondrous encounter is the soul of this subtle, funny, melancholy film.
Read Full Review >USA Today Mike Clark
Romantic comedies with two low-key leads can be asking for trouble, but one senses that the actors must have clicked on some fundamental level.
Read Full Review >Rolling Stone Peter Travers
Don't stall about seeing Sofia Coppola's altogether remarkable Lost in Translation. It's a class-act liftoff for the fall movie season. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years.
Read Full Review >Chicago Tribune Mark Caro
Dislocated from their native country and former lives, Bob and Charlotte come to establish a language of their own. Coppola has done the same, proving she boasts one of today's truly distinct filmmaking voices.
Read Full Review >New York Daily News Jack Mathews
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.
Read Full Review >Miami Herald Rene Rodriguez
It's a sign of just how much Coppola respects her characters that she doesn't make us privy to that final line: It is only meant for them to share. But like the rest of the ethereal Lost in Translation, you don't need to have it spelled out in order to feel it.
Read Full Review >Film Threat Rick Kisonak
There isn't another American screen actor who could have given this performance, not one who so deftly could have navigated the razor's edge separating the wiseacre and the wise.
Read Full Review >Washington Post Desson Thomson
Thanks to two delightful performers, you're drawn powerfully to the outcome.
Read Full Review >Variety David Rooney
The film's unhurried pace will target it for discerning audiences only, but its wry humor and coolly amused observation of contemporary Japan should score with smart urbanites.
Read Full Review >The New Yorker David Denby
Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell. [15 September 2003, p. 100]
Film Threat Stina Chyn
By the time the film was half over, I was ready to catch the next flight to Japan. Until travel arrangements can be made, though, I'll just watch Lost in Translation again.
Read Full Review >The Globe and Mail (Toronto) Liam Lacey
Arguably, Lost in Translation is the American answer to Wong Kar-wai's masterpiece, "In the Mood for Love," though less about history, more about infatuation.
Read Full Review >Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Coppola does a fair job of capturing the fish-tank ambience of nocturnal, upscale Tokyo and showing how it feels to be a stranger in that world, and an excellent job of getting the most from her lead actors. Unfortunately, I'm not sure she accomplishes anything else.
Read Full Review >Charlotte Observer Lawrence Toppman
Coppola lacks a firm grip on this material, and it starts to get away from her midway through.
Read Full Review >Baltimore Sun Michael Sragow
This movie registers like a pop song that enters the mind only in fragments because, as a whole, it lacks the style or substance to be memorable.
Read Full Review >TV Guide Ken Fox
It can be funny, but the humor is too often based in stereotypical perceptions of Asians (they're short, they're laughably polite, they eat weird food), and Coppola shamelessly invites us to laugh along with Murray's character, who, believe it or not, thinks it's hilarious when his hosts get their "r"s and "l"s switched.
Read Full Review >Dallas Observer Gregory Weinkauf
Coppola hasn't delivered a turkey--it's a cute little movie, if not as rich as her brother Roman's similarly themed "CQ"--but when work this potentially satisfying remains flatly obvious, it's almost worse than being flat-out bad.
Read Full Review >What Our Users Said
The average user rating for this movie is 6.4 (out of 10) based on 475 User Votes
Note: User votes are NOT included in the Metascore calculation.
Marc B gave it a10:
Along with Sideways and No Country For Old Men this is one of the three best films of the decade. I love how these two characters connect for a brief moment in time when they are at very different places in their lives. It becomes a bond so intimate, that by the end, even we arent allowed into the privacy of their love(Im thinking of their last scene together). Great film. This film creeps up on you and lingers. All of a sudden this simple story about strangers in Tokyo becomes something more, about the fleeting bonds of unexpected friendship, love and time and chance, and how it can change your life even though it goes so quickly. I love how there is no real time limit on the space they inhabit together. Like, it doesnt go from point a to point b and then end at point c. One minute they are there, amidst the swirling lights of Tokyo, the next moment they are gone. Back to whatever reality is for both of them. Its almost like a dream. All you know is, they connected. If only briefly, they got lost together.
D gave it a10:
One of the greatest films ever made and probably the greatest by an American director. If S. Coppola continues to make films anywhere close to the standard of this masterpiece she could be considered alongside the masters of modern cinema such as Rohmer and Antonioni.
Dave gave it a5:
Definitely overrated by the critics. The humor is rather crass, and much of it stems from ignorance/intolerance of other cultures.
elisabeth h gave it a10:
Lost in Translation is such a deeply memorable and idiosyncratic movie. I've watched it (and marveled at its amazing portrait of dislocation and connection) many times.
maw gave it a0:
I didn't get this movie. Is there something wrong with me?
apostolos a gave it a10:
A movie-trip across your heart! A sound deep into your soul! Yes, we are awake listening to Bob and Charlotte's whispers, taking us far away, above the cityscape of Tokyo! Sofia created a masterpiece! Just for the soul-listeners.
Michael H. gave it a10:
Pure perfection. Moving and touching everytime. The ending brings tears every watch.
