Another two for the masterpiece list, and one more for the four-star elite.

Lost In Translation
Sofia Coppola 2003 US/Japan Nth time; DVD
Two Americans in Japan, one an actor, the other a lonely wife over on her husband's business, meet up and enjoy each other's company.
The loneliness of life, communicated via two people, both frustrated by their respective inert marriages, who find one another in the same alien world. Two notable points, then: the excellent performances carry the film with remarkable weight, and the vision of a new culture, a new way of life, daunting at first and warming at the finish, is wonderfully achieved. Coppola's style is unique, both hip and invididual, accessible and obscure; it's a massively popular film, for instance, but her narrative might fit best in what academics - however outdated they are - define as 'Art Cinema': an accumulation of situations which might not add up to much as a story, which invites us to explore the central relationship, to connect to it, on a much deeper level than otherwise allowed. Perceptive, brave, and utterly fantastic.

Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola 2005 Japan/France/US 1st time; big screen
An Austrian princess is wedded, at 15, to a French Dauphin in the hope of bringing together Versailles and Vienna. At 19 she becomes Queen of France, but trouble is brewing amongst the public.
Ambitious and misunderstood, a tragic, rather quiet film about a girl entering a world completely alien to her, and becoming slowly seduced by it. Seduction is the key word - it's visually fantastic, meticulously designed, and overall irresistible. It's probably going to be remembered (if at all) as a hideously inaccurate biopic with an out-of-place soundtrack. But Coppola continues to impress, as a deceptively bold director who moves on with each film. She has a fine sense of pace, and her control of actors is brilliant; the two can be seen together most evidently when the title character is deflowered, and we cut to the birth of her first child - it might seem too pacy and convenient for some, but Dunst's facial expression lends a weight other directors would have missed (and her performance in general is another lesson in subtlety). Arresting from start to finish, and the final shot, a very brief coda, is haunting and implicit.

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I must see The Virgin Suicides,and quick. But I must say, I think it is most rewarding to enter Coppola's films with as blank a slate as possible, with as few expectations as possible. If that seems obvious, it is especially the case with her.

Coppola's style is not only interesting in itself, but sparks all kinds of debates when placed at the centre of stuff like box-office draw, film and gender, and art/popular discussions. Such things are reductive, but I think she's a fantastic director who is, I suspect, going to be very misunderstood if she continues with this trend of individualistic vision.

...And I very much hope she does. I hope her ambition and confidence isn't knocked by the mixed, cautious reactions Marie Antoinette has received, and I hope she continues to attract funding for her films. It would be a shame if she didn't. For now, though, let us rejoice in this risky, very wonderful number she is dancing, a fine line between box-office success and artistic preoccupations. Can she entertain both, and if so, for how long?

Marie Antoinette was so good, so decorated, so rococo, so "empty", if you like, that I simply didn't wish to discuss it with the group of cineastes with whom I saw it... so futile I suspect, would my praises have been.

I like the way she handles her narratives, too. In both Lost In Translation and Marie Antoinette I see a tendency to unfold narrative as a series of situational repetitions - and in the case of the latter, visual repetitions, in the form of the daily feasts between Marie and Louis. There's certainly room, perhaps justification, for boredom here, for some, but her rhythm and pacing are too controlled for me to be switched off by it. In fact I find it enthralling.

Marie Antoinette might work either way on a revisit, so I'm not going to see it again until it comes to DVD - just as going in with few to no expectations on a first time is a must, I think it even applies (and even to Lost In Translation, too) when you revisit her films.