Films Like Lost in Translation

Jesse and Céline meet on a train to Vienna and spend one night walking through the city talking — about love, death, chance, and whether they'll ever see each other again. Linklater made this on almost no money with two actors who helped write their own dialogue, and the result is one of the most romantic films ever made, not because of what happens but because of the quality of attention two people give each other. The sequels — Before Sunset and Before Midnight — are equally good and together make the best trilogy in American cinema.

Joel discovers that his ex-girlfriend Clementine has had her memories of their relationship erased, and decides to do the same — but partway through the procedure, somewhere deep in his own memory, he changes his mind. Charlie Kaufman's screenplay is one of the great works of American cinema: a film about love and memory and the question of whether knowing how something ends changes whether it was worth beginning. Jim Carrey gives the best performance of his career. Kate Winslet gives one of the best performances of anyone's.

Theodore Twombly, a professional letter-writer in a near-future Los Angeles, falls in love with his operating system — voiced by Scarlett Johansson, present in every scene without ever appearing in one. Jonze's film is tender and funny and genuinely strange, and its central question — what counts as a real relationship? — is more pressing now than when it was released. The Los Angeles it imagines, all warm light and elevated walkways, is one of cinema's great invented spaces.

Five sisters in a 1970s Michigan suburb are watched, from a distance, by the neighbourhood boys who love them — narrated from decades later, by those same boys now middle-aged, still trying to understand. Coppola's debut feature established every element of her style: the dreamy cinematography, the pop music deployed as emotional shorthand, the female interiority rendered as something beautiful and unknowable to the men watching it. Based on Jeffrey Eugenides' novel. Devastating in a way that sneaks up on you.

Don Johnston — not that one — receives an anonymous letter suggesting he may have a son he doesn't know about. His neighbour sends him on a road trip to visit his former lovers and find out. Bill Murray plays Don with the same quality he brought to Lost in Translation: a man so contained he has become almost illegible, moving through the world at a slight remove. Jarmusch structures the film as a series of awkward visits, each one stranger than the last, and refuses to resolve any of it cleanly. Perfect.

An advertising executive and his wife quit their jobs, sell everything, buy a Winnebago, and set off across America to find themselves — and then she loses their entire nest egg at a Las Vegas roulette table on the first night. Brooks wrote, directed, and starred in this comedy that is also a melancholy examination of the gap between the life you imagine and the one you actually have. Funnier than almost anything on this list and sadder than it appears.

Benjamin Braddock graduates from college with no idea what to do next and falls into an affair with his parents' friend Mrs. Robinson — and then falls in love with her daughter. Nichols' film is funnier and stranger than its reputation suggests, and Dustin Hoffman's performance as a man paralysed by possibility is still one of cinema's great portraits of that specific post-adolescent dislocation: the feeling of being at the beginning of something enormous and having no idea how to move. The Simon and Garfunkel score is inseparable from the film's mood.

A British author and a French antiques dealer spend a day together in Tuscany, and somewhere in the middle of it their relationship appears to shift — or perhaps it was always what it becomes, and we misread the beginning. Kiarostami's film is a puzzle about authenticity, about originals and copies, about what we perform for each other and what, underneath the performance, is real. Juliette Binoche won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for her performance, and earned it. The Tuscan villages it moves through have never looked more quietly beautiful.