Columbus

Driven by understated yet passionate performances by John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, the stirring drama Columbus is the debut feature from mono-named film critic Kogonada. Like Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson, this is a film that inextricably links place with ideas, and ideas with characters that are in a holding pattern. The question is whether such a story can find a way to marry the brain and heart, but Columbus pulls it off movingly. Cho plays Jin, a translator who has arrived in Columbus, IN, because his estranged father, an internationally renowned architect, has suffered a stroke while visiting the city—a mecca of remarkable modernist buildings—to give a lecture. Jin meets Casey (Richardson), a high school graduate who works in a library and has eschewed college ambitions to stay in town and care for her mother, a recovering drug addict. Each has a deep well of sadness, and while their age difference all but prohibits romantic attachment, they bond as friends over visits to and conversations about Columbus’s architecture, especially buildings that can’t help but evoke powerful thoughts and feelings. This coming together of two outwardly different people, who each need understanding as well as a jolt to move forward in life, ultimately proves to be irresistible. Also featuring Parker Posey in a small but important part, this is recommended. (T. Keogh)