Two in the Morning, Tokyo

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation understands something most films about loneliness miss—that the worst of it doesn’t announce itself. It arrives as jet lag, as a hotel bar at 3 a.m., as the silence between two people who have no particular reason to be talking but keep doing it anyway. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson circle each other for ninety minutes without ever quite colliding, and that almost-collision is more affecting than any consummation would have been. The film ends with a whisper you can’t hear—Coppola refuses to subtitle it—and you walk away having been allowed into something private, then quietly shut out of the part that matters most. That’s the movie in miniature. That’s why it holds.