Late-Night Comfort Movies: 12 Quiet Films to Wind Down With

Directed by Sofia Coppola

Two sleepless Americans in a Tokyo hotel, a fading actor and a young woman whose husband is always working, keep each other company for a week. Much of the film happens in pauses and half-finished sentences. It suits the hour when you no longer want plot but still want company.

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki

A thirteen-year-old witch moves to a seaside town on her own and starts a delivery service with her broom. Nothing terrible happens. Her problems are ordinary ones: money, a bad week, suddenly losing the knack for the one thing she is good at. It is made for children and lands just as well with an adult who is tired of work.

Directed by Tran Anh Hung

A young servant girl in 1950s Saigon grows up in other peopleʼs houses. Rain on broad leaves, insects in the yard, the white seeds of a papaya cut open: the film is told mostly through sound and small household tasks, and it asks only that you slow down to its pace.

Directed by Jim Jarmusch

One week in the life of a bus driver called Paterson, in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. The same route, the same walk with the dog, the same bar each evening. The film finds its interest in the small variations, and in the poems he writes in a notebook between shifts.

Directed by Naoko Ogigami

A Japanese woman opens a small diner in Helsinki and waits for customers who do not come. A few people drift in anyway: a young Finn who wants the words to an old anime theme song, two other Japanese women with their own reasons for being so far from home. Rice balls, cinnamon rolls, coffee, and almost no conflict at all.

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

After their fatherʼs funeral, three sisters in Kamakura take in the teenage half-sister they have only just met. Plum wine, whitebait on toast and walks by the sea carry the story. Loss is present, but the film is more interested in how people make room for one another.

Directed by Spike Jonze

In a near-future Los Angeles, a man who writes other peopleʼs personal letters for a living falls for his computerʼs operating system. It sounds like a gimmick and plays as a gentle, slightly sad film about being alone in a big city. Warm colors, quiet voices, and a relationship you only ever hear half of on screen.

Directed by Richard Linklater

Nine years after one night in Vienna, two people have an afternoon in Paris before his flight home. The film unfolds almost in real time, about eighty minutes, and the conversation slowly turns from polite to honest. You can watch it without the first film, though it lands harder if you have seen Before Sunrise.

Directed by Kogonada

A man flies in from Seoul when his father falls ill in Columbus, Indiana, a small town full of modernist buildings. He meets a young local woman who loves them and has put her own plans on hold for her mother. They walk, look at architecture and talk. Every shot is carefully framed, and nobody is in a hurry.

Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Cracking crème brûlée with a spoon, a hand buried in a sack of grain. A shy waitress in Montmartre starts arranging small kindnesses for strangers while avoiding her own chances. The film is playful and saturated with red and green, and warmer than its cleverness suggests.

Directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda

A family gathers on a hot summer day for the anniversary of the eldest sonʼs death. Kore-eda watches the small frictions between aging parents and grown children closely and without judgment. The corn tempura gets fried, and old grievances stay where they are. Sad in places, but never heavy-handed.

Directed by Wong Kar-wai

Cans of pineapple with an expiration date, a snack bar on a busy street, “California Dreaminʼ” played over and over. Two loosely linked stories about lovesick policemen move fast and slightly blurred, like the city at night. It is only 100 minutes and lighter than Wong Kar-waiʼs reputation suggests.