Alexander Stuart

  Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere is a rare jewel in this year’s crop of movies: a film that actually made me feel and think about the characters, a film that mesmerized me with its stillness and its quietness, a film that I know I will return to, for its haunting mix of loneliness and the gentle love that family can offer. A highly personal film rather than simply an autobiographical one (Woody Allen’s Manhattan comes to mind as a reference, not in terms of feel but in how that movie reflected both his love of New York and foreshadowed his relationship with a much younger woman), Somewhere draws a deeply shadowed yet highly subtle portrait of a celebrity-scored father-daughter relationship. The father, superbly played by Stephen Dorff , is a not-quite-A-list movie star, Johnny Marco, who spends much of the movie holed up in LA’s wonderfully atmospheric and unique Chateau Marmont hotel.  There, he mixes empty and quite movingly lonely sexual encounters (including a series of a