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100A fascinating, mature, beautifully crafted work of art, from a director who continues to surprise us. Sofia Coppola has absorbed the Italian avant-garde more completely than her father ever did, and has made a film about celebrity in the vein of Antonioni and Bertolucci, a film about Hollywood in which she turns her back on it, possibly forever.
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100Coppola is a fascinating director. She sees, and we see exactly what she sees. There is little attempt here to observe a plot. All the attention is on the handful of characters, on Johnny.
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100Coppola is a filmmaker who fills up a big canvas with small moments: That's the opposite of working in miniature, even though she's attuned to the tiniest details.
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100The opening shot of Somewhere, Sofia Coppola's exquisite, melancholy and formally audacious fourth feature, prepares you for what is to follow in a characteristically oblique and subtle manner.
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88This is an intentionally fanciful, gossamer movie, extremely personal and heartfelt, influenced in equal parts by Michelangelo Antonioni (although never so elusive) and Gus Van Sant (just not quite so self-conscious).
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88A distinctly European exercise in observational nuance and tonal restraint in which Coppola stretches static images to the breaking point.
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83The movie's redemptive structure is a bit routine, yet I watched nearly every scene with a sense of discovery. Coppola is a true filmmaker, and in Somewhere she pierces the Hollywood bubble from the inside.
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80Coppola's audacity in not only portraying the unmoored nature of Marco's life but immersing the audience in it proves satisfying over time.
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80Those who groan that the writer-director has made another indulgent film about the obscenely privileged have overlooked Coppola's redoubtable gifts at capturing milieu, languor, and exacting details.
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Dec 11, 201080It may not have Lost In Translation's reach, but it's original and smartly funny with top performances.
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80The ever-perceptive writer-director further hones her gifts for ruefully funny observation and understated melancholy with this low-key portrait of a burned-out screen actor.
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79By the end of Somewhere, all I could summon up was a fervent wish-you-well - not for him, but for his beguiling elf of a child.
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75Slowly becomes a thoughtful and interesting deconstruction and demythologizing of American celebrity.
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75Ultimately, Somewhere may be too static, too minimalist a tale. But there's grace here.
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75Throughout, Dorff is doggedly credible as an obtuse actor, but the richer performance here is from Fanning, and it might have been a stronger movie told from her character's point of view.
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75"Don't tell, show" has been the writer's imperative for generations; Coppola takes that edict to its most visual and satisfying extremes.
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75Whatever the intention, Somewhere, in its odd, detached way, is compelling viewing.
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75It's all so uneasily compelling and quietly moving, it might be too much to ask her to sustain it through the conclusion.
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75Some could find the story verging on self-indulgence, and indeed there are patches that teeter perilously close. But we care about the two main characters, and we root for them to reconnect as father and daughter.
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75As in "Lost in Translation," Coppola keeps an eye out for the broken places. That's when Somewhere is really something.
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75A small but, in its way, daring picture.
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70This is a mood piece, shapeless but often lyric.
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70It's easy to speculate that the loving Cleo and the frequently absent Johnny are stand-ins for Ms. Coppola and her own famous father, but Somewhere needn't be seen as a film à clef. The movie stands on its own terms as a slow-burning drama of life in a Hollywood purgatory where you can not only check out but leave.
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70Slight but often seductive and so deliberately not in a hurry it periodically threatens to dissolve right in front of our eyes, Somewhere is more successful in creating ambience and visual imagery than it is in telling its story of a movie star bonding with his 11-year-old daughter.
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Dec 11, 201070After her foray into historical costumers with "Marie Antoinette," Sofia Coppola makes a happy return to "Lost in Translation" territory in the cutback charmer Somewhere, which illuminates the emptiness of a movie star's life in Los Angeles through close observation and gentle irony.
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70A clearly personal effort, Somewhere demonstrates Coppola's featherweight touch with big subjects like identity and human connection.
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67The result imparts something of the emptiness of Johnny's existence and, if you're not partial to either the fellow or the technique, might very well drive you up a tree.
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60Fans of Coppola's movies (and/or perfume ads) will find this free of the absurd pop-rock flourishes in "Antoinette" and more consistent with the skilled tonality and narrative ambiguity of "Translation."
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60Dorff and Fanning are perfect in their roles, and Coppola captures the draining narcissism of celebrity culture with the understanding of someone who"s witnessed it all her life.
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60The difference between a movie about emptiness and an empty movie becomes abundantly clear.
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50I can't say why Coppola wanted to spend time with this man. It's like following someone on Twitter who fails to generate many compelling tweets.
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42Sometimes empty is just empty. What Gertrude Stein said about Oakland can also apply to Somewhere: "There is no there there."
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40Oh, the ennui. In Somewhere, it's so thick you could cut it with Stephen Dorff's chiseled cheekbones.
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40The futility of a noodling movie star is hardly a revelation of the absurdity of the human condition, or whatever this movie is supposed to be about. [20 & 27 Dec. 2010, p. 146]
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40Somewhere has a lot of good impulses, and a salutary faith in an audience's patience; but the film's tone, in its script, performances and visual style, is studiously uninflected. It's a document of people seen remotely, maybe from outer space.
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38Somewhere is a triumph of tedium, banality passing for depth, a vacuous embrace of nothing.
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38This movie works best as a sleep tonic. Somewhere isn't just frustratingly slow-moving; it's inert.
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30Where are we? What is this empty, science-fiction-like space in which luxury goods and women who resemble them are ceaselessly rotated in front of our eyes? Oh, it's Hollywood.
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25To compete with the quintessence of nullity that is Sofia Coppola's insufferable Somewhere, imagine a film called "Wanna See Me Crack My Knuckles?" or possibly "Let's Learn How Long It Takes This Shallow Dish of Liquid To Evaporate."
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12The latest calcified bore by Sofia Coppola is less pretentious than "Marie Antoinette" but every bit as inertly stupefying as "Lost in Translation."
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 11 out of 23
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Mixed: 3 out of 23
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Negative: 9 out of 23
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