In what looks like a bit of a spiritual sequel to Somewhere — if you add a couple or more  decades to each of the characters — Bill Murray plays a womanizing dad concerned about the possibly adulterous activities of his daughter’s husband (Marlon Wayans) in Sofia Coppola’s On the Rocks. Rashida Jones plays the disbelieving daughter in a picture sure to bring the feels for the beauty of a pre-pandemic New York City. The film is forthcoming as the first venture between Apple TV+ and A24 and will be in theaters and online in October.

From 1986, the year in which he made two flat-out masterpieces (Salvador and Platoon) to 1995, when he directed his boldest and richest film to that point (Nixon), Oliver Stone was on a streak like no other filmmaker has ever had before or since. Ten films in ten years, many of them (Born on the Fourth of July, JFK, The Doors) enormous epics and all of them ambitious attempts to assess where America had been, where it was, and where it was going. The scale and depth of Stone’s work during this period is equaled by the diversity of tone, […]

The Independent Filmmaker Project (IFP) announced today that Dustin Hoffman will receive the Actor Tribute and Sofia Coppola the Director Tribute at the 2017 IFP Gotham Awards. “We are thrilled to present Dustin Hoffman with the Actor Tribute. Starting with his breakthrough role in the timeless classic The Graduate to his highly praised turn in his upcoming film, The Meyerowitz Stories, Dustin’s wide range of roles – often portraying antiheroes or the marginalized – and the creative choices he has embodied in these complex characters, has firmly placed him amongst the most compelling actors to have graced the screen,” said Joana […]

There is really no reason for us not to post a trailer for a forthcoming “holiday special” directed by Sofia Coppola and designed expressly as a hang-out vehicle for Bill Murray. Judging by the fact that A Very Murray Christmas has an actual plot and a lot of shadowy interior lighting, it would seem that Coppola has effectively made her next medium-/feature- length film rather than dashing off a simple TV assignment. It drops December 4.

It’s Halloween and you know what that means: less than two shopping months before Christmas! On the heels of summer’s David Fincher-helmed ads encouraging you to “dress normal,” we now have four Sofia Coppola-directed spots tied to the holiday season. The theme is that you don’t have to “get” your family, girlfriend or other significant players in your life to get them Gap. The shots and vibe are recognizably Coppola’s, the musical selections predictably eclectic. My pick of the litter — the only minute-long spot, the others being 30 seconds long — is embedded above, but it’s a playlist, so […]

With less than a month before the Cannes Film Festival starts up, the jury lineup has been fully unveiled. As announced in January, the jury president will be New Zealand director Jane Campion (Top Of The Lake, The Piano). Now her fellow jurors have been named: • Carole Bouquet, the veteran French actress who made her debut in Luis Buñuel’s That Obscure Object Of Desire • Sofia Coppola, whose The Bling Ring was the divisive opening film of the festival’s 2012 Un Certain Regard slate • Leila Hatami, the Iranian actress best known internationally as the star of Asghar Farhadi’s […]

Filmmaker has teamed up with A24 and Lionsgate to offer five lucky readers the opportunity to win a DVD or Blu-ray copy of Sofia Coppola’s kinetic drama about a gang of Los Angeles teens who targeted and robbed the homes of celebrities they were obsessed with. The film is out to buy from tomorrow, but to get your own free copy from Filmmaker all you have to do is be among the first to email nick AT filmmakermagazine DOT com with the correct answer to the following question: The Bling Ring was the final film of which revered cinematographer?   […]

Closing this past weekend with the North American premiere of Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, a rousing if troubling film from the talented poster child of Hollywood nepotism, the Seattle International Film Festival ended another stellar edition in appropriately laidback style for this sneakily large, aesthetically pleasing, generally all-too-inviting, pot-positive town. SIFF is a mammoth event, a well-oiled machine, smartly run and elegantly programmed; if there is a festival with a more devoted community of volunteers and board members, cultish cinephiles and casual participants making it into a unique and unusual thing, I don’t know of it. More on that […]

Portraits of purgatory dot this year’s Cannes Film Festival, with movies that run the gamut in terms of styles and techniques: epic drama, cheeky comedy, documentary, animation, and surrealism. No matter what the setting, the plight is the same, with characters stuck in a cycle of emotional limbo where hope for happiness floats tantalizingly but incessantly out of reach. The most accomplished of the group is The Great Beauty, Paolo Sorrentino’s voluptuously crafted riff on La Dolce Vita and a masterful study of 65-year-old Jep Gambardella (Toni Servillo), a dilettante journalist still coasting on the acclaim of a single early-career […]

Alice Munro wrote a short story once called “Deep Holes,” and it’s as fitting a title as any when one considers her body of work. Munro has made a career out of writing the same short story over and over again, but because that story is shot through with an incredible amount of depth, with endless bottoms of nuance and complexity and minor shifts and adjustments each time, it constantly amazes. Jonathan Franzen (who himself rewrote his 2001 classic novel The Corrections as the even better Freedom), reviewing Munro’s 2004 collection Runaway, nailed it: I like stories because it takes […]