The story of a pair of Americans adrift in Tokyo luxury—a photographer’s young wife, who has tagged along on his business trip, and an actor, who is doing an advertising campaign—depends on the sheen that Coppola finds in that luxury. The tangled rainbow of the city’s neon shine, the shifting reflections on thick glass, the chromed and lacquered and polished surfaces, and the sense of curated light filling sharply defined spaces like a perfumed mist all lend Tokyo the nuanced power of a living character. The experiences that the duo at the heart of the film might have hoped to find there, the dreams that draw them in, the chill that keep them back, and the despair that pushes them together are virtually personified <...> Coppola renders the world around them at least as expressive. With her canny use of point-of-view shots she joins looking and thinking, emotion and action in an echoing complexity that’s all the more remarkable for its apparent simplicity.

Richard Brody for The New Yorker