Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  In Sofia Coppola’s seventh film, the New York-based comedy-drama, On the Rocks , the writer-director is reteamed with her male muse, Bill Murray. Murray is the father Coppola never had, great with kids in small doses if this film is anything to go by but incapable of marital fidelity. Coppola’s actual father, Francis Coppola, the director of three Godfather movies as well as of Apocalypse Now and The Conversation , has been married to Eleanor for 57 years, so clearly this film is not autobiographical. Coppola apparently put some of her father’s somewhat outrageous opinions into the mouth of art dealer Felix Keane, played with relaxed é lan by Murray. You find yourself asking: ‘did he really know a tribe of women in Canada who kidnapped men and placated them by having sex?’ ‘That sounds like your fantasy,’ blocked novelist daughter, Laura (Rashida Jones) tells him. On the Rocks is what some people call a ‘low stakes’ drama, by which is meant that there’s barely any drama at all...

  You wait years for a Coppola movie and two come out at once. Paris Can Wait , the travelogue, sorry road movie starring Diane Lane and Arnaud Viard and written and directed by Eleanor Coppola will be the subject of a later entry in this series. First we have The Beguiled , written for the screen and directed by Sofia Coppola, Eleanor’s talented daughter. The Beguiled is Coppola’s sixth feature film, after The Virgin Suicides , Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere and The Bling Ring . You will have seen or heard of the second one, you know Bill Murray goes to Japan to make a whiskey commercial and hangs out with Scarlett Johansson, before she became Black Widow. This is typical Coppola – not big drama. She has also done TV – Murray asked her to helm his Netflix special, A Very Murray Christmas . Great title, but I remember Scrooged , man, a very underwhelming Christmas comedy. She has also directed opera – La Traviata – in Milan, with costumes by Valentino. Some...

Still courtesy of A24 Films (US) / Mubi (UK) For her eighth film as writer-director, Priscilla , Sofia Coppola re-tells the true story of young Priscilla Beaulieu’s relationship with the controlled and controlling pill popper, Elvis Aaron Presley, singing star and icon, characterised in the movie by a twitchy leg that, when he sits down, never stops moving. Constrained to some extent by being unable to use Elvis’ tunes – he is only shown performing a Jerry Lee Lewis number, ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On’ – Coppola concentrates on the limited viewpoint of her titular protagonist, who first is introduced to Elvis in 1958 and, after spending some time with him at parties hosted in his house while he is on military service in Wiesbaden, Germany finds herself left behind then summoned by him, then left behind and so forth. Referring to her as Cilla or ‘Satnin’ – weirdly the nickname Elvis also gave to his late mother – the star attracts and repels Priscilla in equal measure until she final...