The new “guess we have to call it a biopic, what other word fits?” Priscilla, directed by Sofia Coppola from a screenplay she adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoirs, is exactly what you suspect it is, though exactly what you suspect it is depends on your tastes and history with the director. Do you find […]

In the year of our Lord 2020, you have either made your peace with Sofia Coppola’s entire filmmaking project focusing on stories of upper-class women suffering from an indescribable ennui – women whose biographies overlap in significant ways with Coppola herself – or you have not. As long as they remain insightful and clever, I’m […]

First things first: the sheer weirdness of watching a director whose work up till now has all been characterised by a glacial sheen of emotional remove from her characters and their behavior retelling a story of hothouse Southern Gothic sexuality during the U.S. Civil War – and maintaining that glacial quality! – is all it […]

Every week this summer, we’ll be taking an historical tour of the Hollywood blockbuster by examining an older film that is in some way a spiritual precursor to one of the weekend’s wide releases. This week: the year’s third superhero movie, and the last of the summer, The Wolverine finds the title character traveling to […]

Sofia Coppola’s biggest liability as a filmmaker is typically identified as her immensely cloistered upbringing as an untouchable scion of Hollywood royalty, someone for whom moneyed Southern California celebrity life is so utterly normalised and unexceptional that she’s literally incapable of imagining what it might be like to live like the enormous majority of human […]

Author’s note, 2023: What a weirdly uncharitable, withholding review for the film from 2010 that I have, beyond a shadow of a doubt, thought of more often than any other. I’d even at this point call it a bonafide masterpiece and the director’s best work. I leave this review in place as a testimony to […]