About Lost in Translation
An aging American movie star in Tokyo to shoot a whisky commercial and a recently married twenty-something whose husband keeps leaving her at the Park Hyatt drift into a friendship over a few jet-lagged days. Sofia Coppola scores the city to My Bloody Valentine and Air, and lets the final whispered line stay private for twenty years and counting.
Released in 2003 and running a tight 1h 42m, Lost in Translation sits firmly in the comedy tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in English. Read a contemporary review — useful before you book a ticket.
Director: Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Lost in Translation is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Sofia Coppola currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow the festival circuit notes from the criticism outlets linked at the bottom of this page.
Cast
The principal cast — Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception. Cast notes and credits are useful for tracking through other adjacent indie work.
Where to watch Lost in Translation
Currently playing in 12 US cities across our directory. The deepest scheduling is in:
- Chicago, IL — booked at 3 independent cinemas.
- Los Angeles, CA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Monica, CA — booked at 2 independent cinemas.
- Lake Oswego, OR — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Williamstown, MA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Seattle, WA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Fairfax, VA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Ann Arbor, MI — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Las Vegas, NM — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Port Townsend, WA — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Kew Gardens, NY — booked at 1 independent cinema.
- Highlandtown, MD — booked at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory, or browse the next seven days of showtimes for last-minute additions.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Lost in Translation is a clean fit for that model: a 1h 42m comedy work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas listed in the schedule above are the venues currently doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Comedy genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition. Programmer notes are sometimes the fastest way to triangulate which other films share a sensibility.