A bittersweet tale of modern melancholy and cultural alienation, Sofia Coppola’s second feature offers an ebullient visual style built almost entirely on the atmosphere of Tokyo’s strange blend of the international and the indigenous. A washed-up American actor visiting Japan to film a whiskey commercial (Murray) finds himself adrift in the strange, airless atmosphere of a sleek Tokyo hotel. He strikes up a friendship with a fellow guest (Johansson), the young wife of a photographer who is similarly bored and uneasy about the direction of her life. The actor’s inability to communicate with his wife, and the girl’s difficulties with her husband, bring them together in the strange and utterly foreign dream world of Tokyo at night as the pair negotiates flirtatious steps toward a romance that never materializes.