Sofia Coppola never misses. Every movie the indie auteur comes out with is a pastel toned, carefully considered gift, closely captured and female driven, with a killer cast attached and a Tumblr-tinged alt-rock soundtrack as the cherry on top. Her vision is singular, blending a keen aesthetic sensibility with spellbinding, introspective storytelling that feels feminist without being overly didactic. Yes, there are often a lot of bored rich people spinning out, but there are always snippets of universal wisdom to be found — that’s just Sofia! She’s always operated in the space between cinema, music and fashion, often borrowing from one discipline to inspire new creativity in another, and doing it deftly, all the while exploring complicated human feelings.
Here is every movie in her beautiful, inimitable filmography, ranked.
9. A Very Murray Christmas (2015)
“This is your idea of a Christmas special? This is a national disgrace,” says Michael Cera, metatextually. A little soulless, but the festive showcase provides some fun regardless, with features from Jenny Lewis and Miley Cyrus.
8. On the Rocks (2020)
When Laura (Rashida Jones), a Manhattanite novelist, starts to suspect infidelity of her always-out-of-town husband (Marlon Wayans), her overbearing father Felix (Bill Murray) is eager to indulge the sentiment. “You’re mine, until you get married,” we hear him tell her at the beginning of the film. “Then, you’re still mine.” Creepy! A more sobering film than her usual dreamlike fare, this dramedy is still full of relatable and intimate moments, parsing family attachments alongside dating monologues from a classically unhinged Jenny Slate character.
7. The Bling Ring (2013)
There’s a lot to love about The Bling Ring, though it is a little static in its telling of a series of Hollywood Hills robberies in the late 00s. Emma Watson and Taissa Farmiga steal the show as Nicki and Sam (based on Alexis Neiers and Tess Taylor) as they storm the unattended homes of the rich and famous with their celeb-obsessed friends, using social media to triangulate their whereabouts. Sofia experiments with form as we are shown mock-ups of ancient Facebook pages where the teen thieves apparently brandished their spoils; we’re treated to a soundtrack of M.I.A., Azealia Banks and Sleigh Bells — as well as, of course, Emma Watson’s Valley Girl accent.
6. Somewhere (2010)
The filmmaker’s superior father-daughter dramedy is a no plot just vibes masterwork following Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a depressive A-lister who unexpectedly finds himself responsible for his 11-year-old daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) when his ex-wife suffers a mental breakdown. We’ve sung the praises of the film’s tennis-themed pole dance routine set to Amerie’s “1 Thing”, but it’s the father-daughter chemistry that really shines through the wry Hollywood satire. That and the Julian Casablancas demo.
5. Lost in Translation (2003)
Perhaps Sofia’s most beloved film, Lost in Translation is inarguably one of her most visually iconic: artfully-captured shots of whiskey tumblers, the soft neon lights of Tokyo city life, that pink bobbed wig. A newly-minted college graduate (Scarlet Johansson), lonely in her marriage to a celebrity photographer, meets a washed-up movie star (Bill Murray) in the city. The two Americans bond over their mutual isolation, drink, smoke cigarettes and sing karaoke, exploring the liminal spaces available to them and each other’s depressive existential feelings. No wonder the story resonates with audiences today just as much as it did when it was released 20 years ago.
4. The Beguiled (2017)
Sofia set out to make her own version of the Clint Eastwood-starring gothic in order to retell the story from the perspective of its female characters. “It’s a story about strong women, and I wanted to look at these characters in more depth, where in the 1971 film, they’re more kind of crazy, or just caricatures,” she said in a 2017 interview. “You don’t really know as much about them.”
Starring Nicole Kidman as the headmistress of an all-girls boarding school, Kirsten Dunst as a mild-mannered teacher and Elle Fanning as a boisterous pupil, the film takes place in Confederate Virginia during the Civil War. The arrival of a wounded soldier (Colin Farrell) sets the story’s events into motion, his presence causing angsty infatuations and obsession among the girls. Thematically ambitious and dark, the results are, well, beguiling.
3. Marie Antoinette (2006)
From the film’s post-punk playlist to the lilac Converse pictured in the background of a party scene, the delights of Marie Antoinette never seem to age. “There is a handful of candied orange peels and sugared raspberries,” writes critic Jaya Saxena, “that taught me more about the excesses of Versailles than any AP World History class.” Sofia pushed the boundaries of the historical drama, bringing the genre to new heights with her empathetic portrait of a lost, over-privileged young woman. As the doomed queen, Kirsten Dunst plays her role with just the right measures of humour and vulnerability, bringing complexity to a villainous archetype who was really just a peon in a wider political game.
2. Priscilla (2023)
Much like her motivation with The Beguiled, Sofia’s latest project, Priscilla, was created to throw us into a world we’ve overwhelmingly seen from the male perspective — and flip it. Telling the story of Priscilla Beaulieu, who would become the wife of one Elvis Presley, it’s an intoxicating concoction: a story of power play and subservience, of living in the shadow of a fawned over rockstar, of the ripple effects of being subjected to fame’s byproducts second-hand. In the titular role, Cailee Spaeny delivers a miraculous performance opposite a career-best Jacob Elordi as Elvis. It operates as a stunning counterpart to the overly-shiny and flattering Baz Luhrmann biopic of the rock musician; one that asks you to consider the semantics of abuse and the infallible framing of celebrity.
1. The Virgin Suicides (1999)
Kirsten Dunst’s performance in this, as the tender and mysterious Lux Lisbon, no doubt shaped a generation. It may have only been Sofia’s debut feature, but The Virgin Suicides is arguably a perfect adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ haunting novel of the same name, about a group of sisters living and struggling in the suffocating suburbia of 70s Detroit. Told retrospectively from the perspective of a group of hapless and horny teen boys, the film is narrated by Giovanni Ribisi’s regretful timbre.
From the X-ray vision shot of Lux’s underwear to the hand-drawn title cards that introduce each sister, the film oozes artistic personal style. Interspersing profound melancholy with moments of levity and powerful needle drops from Heart, Air, Al Green and more, it’s a timeless, heady mix that earns the movie its top spot here.
“I really didn’t know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and saw so clearly how it had to be done,” Sofia wrote in the film’s production notes. “I immediately saw the central story as being about what distance and time and memory do to you, and about the extraordinary power of the unfathomable.”