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.
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 festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
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.
Where to watch Lost in Translation
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Chicago, IL — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Los Angeles, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Santa Monica, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Lake Oswego, OR — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Williamstown, MA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Seattle, WA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Fairfax, VA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Ann Arbor, MI — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Las Vegas, NM — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Port Townsend, WA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Kew Gardens, NY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Highlandtown, MD — listed 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.
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 in the cities listed above are the venues 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.