--- title: "Columbus" year: 2017 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/columbus" fi1m_score: 82 critics_score: 82 critics_reviews: 21 published: "2026-09-17T12:48:33.580935+00:00" updated: "2026-09-17T12:48:33.849183+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Columbus (2017) Directed by Kogonada · 1h 44m · MPA PG-13 · Drama **Fi1m score: 82** · Critics 82 from 21 reviews *In a sentence:* The most emotionally available thing in Columbus, Indiana, is a bank > Kogonada’s first film sets two stalled people loose among the modernist buildings of Columbus, Indiana, and lets them talk. It is exact, quiet and more affecting than its stillness suggests, though Jin’s half of the story stays thinner than Casey’s. ## Synopsis Columbus, Indiana, a small town known for its modernist buildings. Jin (John Cho), a translator who lives in Seoul, arrives after his father, a scholar of architecture, collapses the day before a lecture and is taken to hospital in a coma. Jin takes a room at an inn and waits, with his father’s colleague Eleanor (Parker Posey) for company. Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a year out of school, works at the town library alongside Gabriel (Rory Culkin) and lives with her mother Maria (Michelle Forbes). She spots Jin smoking outside the inn and, across a fence, offers to show him her favourite buildings. ## Review Jin (John Cho) is in Columbus, Indiana, because his father, a scholar of architecture, collapsed there the day before a lecture and has not woken up. Jin translates books in Seoul, has not spoken properly to his father in years, and does not want to be here. Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a year out of school and working at the library, loves the town’s modernist buildings the way other people her age love bands. She sees him smoking across a fence and offers to show him her favourites. Kogonada, who writes, directs and edits, has built a whole film out of those walks. It is a small film and an exact one, and we recommend it. The plot is two people talking in front of buildings. What Kogonada gets from that is one of the best performances by a young actor we have seen in some years. Richardson plays Casey as someone who has learned to seem fine: she recites the guidebook facts about each building with bright, practised fluency and goes quiet when asked anything about herself. The scene most critics single out is the right one. Outside a glass-walled bank at night, Jin stops her patter and asks what the place actually does to her. As she starts to answer Kogonada takes the sound away and films her through the glass, so we watch her hands and her face and hear nothing. It moved us more than we expected, and we think that is why he did it: he wants us to look at her the way she looks at the building. Elisha Christian shoots nearly everything from a fixed camera, straight on or at right angles, with the people set off to one side and the architecture taking the rest of the frame. Kogonada, cutting his own film, holds on rooms after people have left them. Diana Rice’s production design sets the town’s clean concrete and glass against Casey’s house, low-ceilinged, cluttered and lit by a television, so that each time she steps outside the film seems to take a breath. Emily Moran keeps her in the same few plain shirts, and Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson’s score is long held tones that come in over the buildings and stay out of the kitchen. Cho has the harder job, because Jin’s grievance is with a man we only see asleep, and he plays it small: a tightness in the shoulders, a flat voice whenever his father comes up. His scenes with Eleanor (Parker Posey), his father’s colleague and a figure from his own adolescence, are the most wary in the film, and Posey plays a woman who has decided to be kind and is finding it an effort. Rory Culkin’s Gabriel, Casey’s colleague at the library, gets a speech about attention and interest that is funnier than it has any right to be. Michelle Forbes has three or four scenes as Maria, Casey’s mother, and makes each one count. The flaws are mostly on Jin’s side. Casey is shown and Jin is explained; his history arrives in speeches. The Eleanor strand hints at more than it delivers. Two or three times the pair are posed before a landmark with such care that the shot looks like a brochure, and the film briefly becomes about how handsome the buildings are, which is the one thing it does not need to be about. And there is a stretch late on, which we will not describe, in which decisions that took an hour to set up are settled in about ten minutes. Most critics reach for Ozu and for Richard Linklater, and both fit: the low fixed camera, the kitchen tables, talk as the action. Our own best moment was not in front of any building. Casey, alone at night, puts music on in her car and dances in the headlights, badly, the way a person dances when nobody is watching, and Kogonada does not cut. We were closer to tears than we could account for, and we still cannot. It runs 104 minutes and is a 12A, with nothing in it a child would object to and a fair amount they would sleep through. Watch it at home with the phone in another room. It needs the quiet, and it repays it. *Fi1m score 82, published 17 September 2026.* ## What the critics say Most critics warm to Kogonada’s debut, and they warm to it for the same reasons. The praise clusters on the way the film puts the modernist buildings of Columbus, Indiana, at the centre of a friendship rather than behind it, and on Haley Lu Richardson, whose performance is named again and again as the emotional core. John Cho is often mentioned alongside her. The composition and framing draw near-universal admiration, and Ozu is the comparison most reviews reach for. The reservations are few and mild, and the spread is narrow, with almost every review landing in the same approving range. Where critics hesitate, it is over pace and thinness. Little White Lies finds the final act jarring; Time Out finds the story and performances less polished than the photography; The Wrap, the one plainly cool notice, complains that the minimalism leaves the characters underdeveloped. Nobody disputes that the film is carefully made. The question the dissenters raise is whether the care carries the story. ### Reviews we read (21) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (90/100, inferred): The architecture is the star in this absorbing debut where Kogonada creates an engrossing and unexpectedly passionate film about feelings displaced into space and building materials. Haley Lu Richardson is outstanding as the young architecture buff who forms a friendship with John Cho's character. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/oct/05/columbus-review-kogonada-john-cho) - **The Hollywood Reporter**, Boyd van Hoeij (90/100, inferred): The critic calls it a soft-spoken and perceptive art-house treat that announces a new director blending small-scale Ozu-like humanism with impressive formalist command of film. Architecture is singled out as the key third ingredient that elevates the character drama into unexpected territory. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/columbus-968301/) - **The New Yorker**, Richard Brody (90/100, inferred): Brody celebrates the film’s intellectual coming-of-age story centered on a young woman’s passionate engagement with Columbus, Indiana’s architectural treasures and her friendship with a visitor. He singles out Haley Lu Richardson’s performance for its emotional and intellectual acuity alongside Kogonada’s analytical visual approach. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/19/the-precocious-genius-of-columbus) - **The Times**, Kevin Maher (★★★★☆): Brainy and sensual, this wildly impressive feature debut is a coming-of-age drama that consistently defies expectation and is built on an indecently charismatic performance from Haley Lu Richardson. It is impeccably filmed with geometric precision. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/property-home/article/film-review-columbus-pr0xcxfkl) - **Film Comment**, Jonathan Romney (85/100, inferred): The critic praises Kogonada’s debut as a strikingly distinctive and mature American film that celebrates architecture’s emotional power and everyday wonder through restrained, cerebral storytelling. It singles out Haley Lu Richardson’s radiant, rapturous performance as a highlight of intellectual and aesthetic passion. [Read](https://www.filmcomment.com/film-week-columbus/) - **Financial Times**, Nigel Andrews (85/100, inferred): Columbus is an absolute charmer whose absolutism is its strength as Kogonada places the modernist buildings of the Indiana town before us and tests the characters’ responses to the artistic verities posed. The framings are uncannily beautiful and the dialogue a wonder. [Read](https://www.ft.com/content/ff95e014-c70f-11e8-ba8f-ee390057b8c9) - **Los Angeles Times**, Justin Chang (85/100, inferred): Chang describes the film as a sensitively attuned debut that links visual form with emotional depth through characters navigating personal ambitions and family ties amid the city’s modernist buildings. He praises the lead performances and the way architecture charges the interactions with meaning. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-columbus-review-20170803-story.html) - **Little White Lies**, Hannah Strong (3/4/3): This absorbing debut explores the relationship between people and spaces in Columbus, Indiana, with strong performances from John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson. The visuals are the real strength, though the slow pace and slightly jarring narrative in the final act hold it back. [Read](https://lwlies.com/reviews/columbus/) - **Radio Times**, Calum Baker (4/5): This dreamy, low-key drama makes wonderful use of Columbus's striking modernist buildings through the bond between John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson. Kogonada crafts a pleasant aesthetic while ensuring the characters' humanity shines through. [Read](https://www.radiotimes.com/movie-guide/b-c65j1x/columbus/) - **Sight and Sound**, Ben Nicholson (80/100, inferred): Kogonada's debut is a meticulously composed coming-of-age story with romantic overtones and intergenerational conflict that recalls Ozu. The film's formal elegance and visual tension around architecture emerge as profoundly affecting elements about family and friendship. [Read](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/film-week-columbus-artfully-balances-pair-opposites) - **Variety**, Geoff Berkshire (80/100, inferred): The review hails the assured, hypnotic debut for treating architecture like music in conversations between the leads and for its gorgeous, meticulously composed filmmaking. It singles out the strong ensemble performances, especially John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson, and the film’s warmth and humanity. [Read](https://variety.com/2017/film/reviews/columbus-review-sundance-john-cho-1201971998/) - **Screen Daily** (75/100, inferred): Kogonada brings an idiosyncratic sensibility to this small-town coming-of-age story set against Columbus, Indiana's modernist architecture, creating a nuanced study of people, space and consciousness. Superb ensemble acting and keen intelligence deliver low-key emotional impact despite its rarefied appeal. [Read](https://www.screendaily.com/reviews/columbus-rotterdam-review/5114306.article) - **The New York Times**, Ben Kenigsberg (Critic’s Pick): The critic praises Kogonada’s confident debut for using the modernist architecture of Columbus, Indiana, as a springboard for exploring generational themes and characters’ connections to place and ideas. It highlights the Ozu-influenced style and strong performances by Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/movies/columbus-review.html) - **Time Out**, Dave Calhoun (3/5): Kogonada's first feature offers brooding atmosphere and striking visuals of modernist architecture, evoking Lost in Translation. The story and performances feel less polished than the photography, though it shows promise. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/columbus) - **The Skinny**, Josh Slater-Williams (★★★★★): The review calls the film a masterful, subtle and deeply humanist debut that blends conversational intimacy in the vein of Linklater with Ozu-like family themes, all framed by striking modernist architecture. It singles out Haley Lu Richardson’s revelatory performance as the emotional core conveying passion and curiosity. [Read](https://www.theskinny.co.uk/film/new-releases/columbus-john-cho-kogonada-review) - **Paste**, Andy Crump (8.9): Kogonada's feature debut is a quiet, graceful tone poem about family duty and personal uncertainty set against striking modernist architecture. Haley Lu Richardson's towering performance anchors the film and supplies its aching humanity. [Read](https://www.pastemagazine.com/article/columbus) - **The Playlist**, Jessica Kiang (90/100, inferred): The critic hails the film as a shimmering, graceful debut overflowing with compassion and natural performances that link modernist architecture appreciation to human connection. She singles out the revelatory work from John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson in drawing an asymmetric yet harmonious friendship. [Read](https://theplaylist.net/rotterdam-review-supercut-superstar-kogonadas-shimmering-debut-columbus-haley-lu-richardson-john-cho-parker-posey-rory-culkin-20170130/) - **Consequence** (85/100, inferred): This restrained debut understands the romantic appeal of intellect and human connection through subtle longing and philosophical conversations. Its seamless blend of meticulous visuals and authentic character work creates an arresting portrait of the Midwest and the need for emotional honesty. [Read](https://consequence.net/2017/08/film-review-columbus/) - **Collider**, Brian Formo (B+): The film is a visually meticulous directorial debut that uses architecture as both setting and metaphor for emotional detachment and personal growth. Haley Lu Richardson delivers a revelatory performance that gives the story its emotional core and elevates the sparse narrative. [Read](https://collider.com/columbus-review-john-cho/) - **Eye for Film**, Amber Wilkinson (80/100, inferred): The critic finds Kogonada's debut a thoughtful, balanced character study of two people forming a connection in Columbus, Indiana. She singles out the film's careful framing and rhythmic editing that create a soothing poise mirroring the modernist architecture. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/columbus-2017-film-review-by-amber-wilkinson) - **The Wrap** (45/100, inferred): The film is a low-key character study in which two strangers bond over modernist architecture in Columbus, Indiana, but it skimps on emotional and narrative details. The critic praises the performances and quiet moments of connection but complains that the minimalist approach leaves characters and relationships underdeveloped. [Read](https://www.thewrap.com/columbus-review-john-cho/) ## Details - **Director:** Kogonada - **Director:** Kogonada - **Writer:** Kogonada - **Cinematography:** Elisha Christian - **Editor:** Kogonada - **Music:** Marc Byrd, Andrew Thompson - **Production design:** Diana Rice - **Costume design:** Emily Moran - **Producer:** Aaron Boyd, Andrew Miano, Chris Weitz - **Cast:** John Cho as Jin; Haley Lu Richardson as Casey; Michelle Forbes as Maria; Rory Culkin as Gabriel; Parker Posey as Eleanor; Erin Allegretti as Emma; Shani Salyers Stiles as Vanessa; Reen Vogel as Cleaner - **Runtime:** 1h 44m - **Certificate (MPA):** PG-13 - **Release (the US):** 4 August 2017 - **Genres:** Drama - **Budget:** $700,000 - **Box office:** $1 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOPsrKZyskg ## Where to watch in the US - Tubi: free, hd - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, sd - Apple TV: rent $3.99, hd - Apple TV: buy $9.99, sd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, sd *Checked 2026-09-17.* Also available in: AE, AR, AT, AU, BE, BG, BR, CA, CH, CL, CO, CZ, DE, EE, ES, FR, GB, GR, HK, HR, HU, ID, IE, IL, IT, KR, LT, MX, MY, NL, NZ, PA, PH, PT, RO, RS, SG, TH, UA, US, VN, ZA. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Tokyo Story* (1953), Fi1m 92: Ozu’s fixed camera and family disappointments, the film every critic reached for here. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/tokyo-story.md) - *Before Sunrise* (1995), Fi1m 89: Two strangers, one city, a night of talk; Linklater without the buildings. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/before-sunrise.md) - *Lost in Translation* (2003), Fi1m 86: A jet-lagged man and a young woman adrift, with a hotel instead of a town. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/lost-in-translation.md) - *Paterson* (2016), Fi1m 84: Jarmusch’s bus-driving poet finds the same quiet in another small American city. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/paterson.md) - *Play Time* (1967): Tati’s modernist Paris, where the glass and steel are the comedy. --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/columbus