The NYT on Bill Murray's acting in LIT:

BILL MURRAY

When a performer becomes a star by seeming hipper than everyone else, it can put a damper on his future as a dramatic actor. Imagine Groucho Marx being tearily sincere or that lordly drunk W. C. Fields owning up to his alcoholism: no, it wouldn't feel right to watch these champions of one-upmanship stripped of their comic masks.

But in "Lost in Translation," Bill Murray has found a role that lets him be the rumpled, mock-suave, slightly lewd hipster that made him a pop-culture icon, and also an achingly vulnerable late-middle-aged man contemplating the wreckage of his life. The performance is a dual triumph — for the actor, who is marvelous, and for the director, Sofia Coppola, who conceived it with his persona in mind. Under Ms. Coppola's direction, Mr. Murray's humor and sadness can now be seen as coming from the same place, his irony rooted in an unshakable sense of isolation.

As the fading movie star Bob Harris, Mr. Murray sits in the sky bar of his Tokyo hotel, so removed from the city that it could be a spaceship. His patter with the film's protagonist, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), is determinedly breezy: almost every line is rounded with a quip. Still, his anguish is palpable. His jokes about his Japanese hosts are not expressions of superiority but of resignation. He will never connect with them. His satire is something to cling to in this alien universe.

Mr. Murray's Bob may not have the vocabulary to express his emotions without sardonic curlicues, but on two occasions he is suddenly "straight." The first is in a karaoke bar, when he croons Bryan Ferry's "More Than This": his "Saturday Night Live" lounge lizard melts away, and we realize with a start that his yearning is sincere. Then, at the end of the film, he whispers into Charlotte's ear — something Ms. Coppola allows to remain private. She gives Mr. Murray his most heartbreaking moment on screen, yet protects his integrity as one of the cinema's great modern clowns.