Kurt Vonnegut

"Lost In Translation is my favorite film this year. I loved it."

Quentin Tarantino

"This is a crush movie. And somewhere around halfway through watching it, I got an incredible crush on the actual movie – every time I've seen it since, I've had a little date with myself."

ABC World News Now

Leah Rozen

"I love this film. I love Lost in Translation. Sofia Coppola, who is only 32, directed it. But boy, is she wise beyond her years.

Bill Murray – he has never been better.

Now this film is funny, it is melancholy, it is smart, it is poignant. Go see it."

Ebert & Roeper

Roger Ebert

"I think that we're looking at an Academy Award nomination here, maybe for both of them. This is certainly one of the year's best movies. One thing I especially admired was the way Bill Murray dials down his gift for comedy, and finds just the right tired and subdued note. Any comedian can be really funny, but it takes a certain genius to be just a little funny kind of quietly funny, kind of wearily funny. It's quite a movie.

I think Lost in Translation will also be well represented at Oscar time with those wonderful performances by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. Sofia Coppola's directing and writing, really wonderful."

Good Morning America

Joel Siegel

"Bill Murray is a great actor. The older he gets the less he does and the better he is. Scarlett Johansson, another fine young actress.

Trapped in Sofia Coppola's genius vision of Tokyo, 2003. Fine as the stars are, and I'd love to see Bill Murray get an Oscar nomination, this is the director's film. She has all the chops, what a haunting movie, great performances, great eye for detail.

It wanders, it watches, it lets you discover it. And make sure you do."

Associated Press

Christy Lemire

"Sofia Coppola's second film establishes her as a director with an assured, unique vision. She draws from Bill Murray one of the best performances of his career; he's heartbreaking as an aging actor stuck doing whiskey ads in Tokyo. Scarlett Johansson, who befriends him in a jetlagged haze, continues to prove she's an actress with maturity and wisdom beyond her years."

Elle

Karen Durbin

"A smart, terrific new comedy with a surprisingly urgent emotional core! Delicate and electrifying! Chief among the pleasures is a great, understated performance by Bill Murray."

Entertainment Weekly

Karen Valby

"Coppola simply honors the magnificent Bill Murray with a suitably wise and tender role. She understands that real romance is often accompanied by terrific restraint. She captures the neon beauty of Tokyo at night and pairs it with the perfect soundtrack."

IFC Rant

Eugene Hernandez and Wendy Mitchell

"Favorite Films of the Year. Favorite Performances: Bill Murray.

Murray can't regret his decision now, as the film showed him at his comic and dramatic peak (and inspired crushes in a whole new generation of moviegoers). Above all, Murray made 2003 "Santori time."

(Scarlett Johansson)'s showing an acting range that her elder peers must envy. In Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, she perfectly captures the wise but confused young bride Charlotte…"

The Onion

Nathan Rabin

"An audacious dramatic comedy. That would be a problem if Translation's leads didn't have such electric chemistry, and if Coppola didn't have such a strong mastery of tone.

Gorgeously shot by Lance Acord, who makes Tokyo a gaudy dreamscape that's both seductive and frightening.

Establishing Sofia Coppola as a major filmmaker in her own right, and reconfirming Johansson and Murray as actors of startling depth and power."

Paper Magazine

Dennis Dermody

"Sofia Coppola's sublime second directorial effort. Their relationship, while not exactly romantic, still leaves you with the same joyous feeling you get after watching Roman Holiday.

Bill Murray has a beautiful, ironic gravity, Johansson a lusciousness, sweetness and keen intelligence. Together they click on screen. Coppola has a masterful shooting sense and really nail that sense of lonely displacement. The modern otherworldliness of Japan is also perfectly suited to the material.

A knockout of a film – funny, smart, stylish but with a real heartfelt emotional core."

Rolling Stone Magazine

Peter Travers

"Bill Murray as a Hollywood star adrift in Tokyo gives the performance of his career. And Scarlett Johansson, 19, matches him step for step as a Yale grad who finds something in him that's missing in her careerist husband. But the real star of this movie is Sofia Coppola, who wrote the year's best original screenplay and directed with a delicacy and precision that belie her thirty-two years. In only her second movie – The Virgin Suicides was her first – Coppola has found a unique voice."

Time Magazine

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. A lovely film."

US Weekly (Hollywood Reporter Critics Pick Special)

Thelma Adams

"Best Picture: Lost in Translation is a four-star film. It transported me; it was an original voice.

Best Director: If that's the best picture, then Sofia Coppola is the best director, and I also choose her for best original screenplay. Her approach is fresh, visual, lyrical. In the year of the massive male epic, I want to recognize the butterfly among them."

Los Angeles Times

Kenneth Turan

"Tart and sweet, unmistakably funny and exceptionally well-observed, this delicate and distinctive film did nothing but good for stars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson and director Sofia Coppola."

New York Magazine

Peter Rainier

"Bill Murray has become an actor of extraordinary range. She (Sofia Coppola) accomplishes the difficult feat of showing people being bored out of their skulls in such a way that we are never bored watching them. She does this by creating such empathy for Bob and Charlotte that our identification with them is almost total. Coppola has hit on a metaphor for modern alienation that is so mundane it's funny.

The movie, which was shot by Lance Acord in lustrous nocturnal tones, presents Japan as an outsider might see it, without apology. The night-worlds both within the hotel and without are equally odd and forbidding. Everything seems hushed – suspended in time-and yet there is always a sense of violence about to break loose."

NY Post

Lou Lumenick

"Sofia Coppola's sublimely romantic and subtle Lost in Translation finally marks the end of a season of brain-dead blockbusters. Bill Murray, who is nothing less than brilliant…"

A fine Scarlett Johansson.

"Coppola…gives Murray free rein to be funny as well as touching in a series of leisurely, poignant vignettes. He (Bill Murray) delivers a rendition of 'More Than This' that's as moving as it is hilarious.

The Bill Murray version of the bittersweet masterpiece 'Brief Encounter,' which is enough to make it a must-see movie for anyone who cares about grown-up movies. Don't be surprised if this haunting tale finally brings the severely underrated Murray the Oscar nods he deserved for Groundhog Day and Rushmore."

The New York Times

A.O. Scott

"Sofia Coppola's ravishing Lost in Translation. Charlotte…played, with heart-melting moodiness, by Scarlett Johansson. Mr. Murray's subtle, aching, witty performance in Lost in Translation, which opened on Friday, is certainly a revelation – and murmurs about an Oscar nomination have already begun. But it is hardly the first in his long and varied career. Wow, you think, this guy is an amazing actor, but such expressions of amazement have been bubbling up, with increasing frequency, for 20 years.

His (Bill Murray's) line readings have a tossed-off, casual quality that makes it easy to overlook his uncannily precise timing. He is one of the best improvisers in movies. Those eyebrows, which could illustrate a dictionary definition of the word supercilious, still twitch in mockery. That smirk still directs our attention toward ironies and incongruities we might otherwise overlook. That doughy body remains an unexpectedly agile vehicle for physical comedy…And there is that voice, so accustomed to whining, wheedling, blustering and babbling, which here veers from its deadpan Midwestern default to growl, mimic, twitter and, in one mesmerizing, world-stopping scene, to sing."

The New York Times Magazine

Lynn Hirschberg

"Lost in Translation is no ordinary American film or typical independent film. With its subtleties of character; its strange, luminous pictorial beauty (especially in its distillation of Tokyo); its literary attention to telling detail; its unforced blending of comedy and sadness; and its dreamy intimacy, the film summons place and sustains mood as few contemporary films do. It also hints, in everything from the set to the soundtrack, at a finely tuned sensibility, a high-low, here-there globalism. When Murray's character, a disillusioned movie star in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial, sings the old Roxy Music song "More Than This" in a late-night karaoke bar, he fuses cultures and generations, to say nothing of earnestness and camp. It's thrilling and new.

Her (Sofia Coppola's) films are sophisticated and patently romantic, and the emotions she stirs up linger. It is perhaps not too much to say that she is the most original and promising young female filmmaker in America.

Coppola is fascinated by memory, by moments – good and bad – that will never be forgotten, moments at the center of which are young women on the verge of something they cannot quite articulate but feel compelled to act upon. It's these particular moments Coppola has captured on film so beautifully and movingly."

Newsday

John Anderson

"That someone as young as writer-director Sofia Coppola could produce something as sophisticated and knowing as Lost in Translation was almost as baffling as Bill Murray's performance. As a combination of Buster Keaton and John Gielgud, Murray made us realize, even as the movie was unspooling, what a strange, lofty place he holds in the collective consciousness of movie-going America."

The Village Voice

J. Hoberman

"It's Bill Murray's movie. I can't imagine another actor bringing the same wry wounded dignity to his role. The movie is lyrical, touching, and gently discombobulated. Coppola evokes the emotional intensity of a one-night stand far from home – but what she really gets is the magic of movies."

The Wall Street Journal

Joe Morgenstern

"It makes me glad to be an American. 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.

Little (else) about this beautiful movie is standard, let alone predictable. Ms. Johansson makes acting look easy. Her instincts are sure and her spirit is sweet in this lovely portrait of a young woman whose vivid passion and intelligence have had nowhere to light. As for Mr. Murray, he gives the best performance of his career, but that doesn't begin to describe the mysterious grace or complexity of the tragicomic character he creates.

Clearly Ms. Coppola has studied her Godard, Cassavetes, Tati and Chaplin. (And just possibly her Coppola) … But she's her own woman now, a stylist of such strength and confidence as could not have been predicted.

It's great to see Sofia Coppola adding luster to her family's name, but greater still to see her searching out a sense of humanity that's in desperately short supply, both in modern life and contemporary movies. The whole film is pure gain, and pure pleasure."

Movieline/Hollywood Life Magazine

Stephen Farber

"Coppola guides her actors through beautifully shaded performances. Murray gets to utilize his comic skills in scenes that show him reacting to his bizarre surroundings but he also summons a touching gravity that we haven't seen before. Johansson gives her most eloquent performance to date and Ribisi and Ana Faris etch near satiric turns in their supporting roles.

Coppola's sensitive direction of the actors isn't her only triumph here. (Working with cinematographer Lance Acord) She also achieves a marvelous sense of place, demonstrating striking visual skills along with a delicate human touch. It's a pleasure to welcome Sofia Coppola into the filmmaking fraternity."

Vanity Fair

Bruce Handy

"Lost in Translation, which she (Sofia Coppola) wrote and directed, may well be the best movie of the year. Few other filmmakers have as deft a way with atmosphere or as clear a notion of how it can be used to enrich a story…no other filmmaker has as piercing a sense of youthful despair."