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Like Richard Linklater's Before films, this exquisitely wrought drama has an instinctive feel for how conversation moves across time and space, and as the protagonists drift through this modernist wonderland, their aesthetic exchanges guide them steadily toward an emotional reckoning. The real thrill is watching Kogonada, a video essayist for years, use his analytical and ekphrastic gifts to remap the contours of the teen movie.

Video essayist Kogonada made his narrative feature debut with visually striking but narratively dire, Columbus. . . . Narratively, the film is little more than a patronising guided tour of the modern architecture that marks the film's titular city,

Previously known for comedy, Cho gives a fine dramatic performance. Richardson is amused by other people, and I enjoyed watching that amusement break over her face, as well as the wonder when she engages the buildings, tracing their contours with her hand... As shot by Elisha Christian, Columbus is a magical place, but there's something forlorn about it, as well, as if the buildings are telling their own story about the way their spirit has been abandoned.

It's rare that a first-time director makes a film as quietly self-assured as Columbus, the superb debut feature from the popular video essayist Kogonada... We tend to associate modernist style with chilly formalism, but Columbus' warm, luscious color palette—all deep oranges and bright, vegetal greens—reminds us of the utopian ambitions of the movement's practitioners.

There's a lot of wide open space, and a lot of room for thought and feeling, in this movie's beautifully grand canvas. Kogonada's instinct is to map the inner lives of his characters onto their surroundings, folding their mutual affection for each other into a more urgent story about intellectual self-discovery. They walk and talk, argue, and push each other toward understanding. Richardson, with her quiet demeanor and earnest expressions, is particularly marvelous.

Watching the film is almost like feeling the muscles in your eyes shift, as you look up from reading a book to stare out at the ocean. From the very first shot, it's clear that the buildings will be essential. They are a part of the lives unfolding in their shadows. Sometimes it almost seems like they are listening.

The rapport that develops between [Casey and Jin] is reminiscent of the relationship in Lost in Translation, occasionally edging into flirtation without ever being driven by it. It's the rapport of two people who find common ground while navigating the respective limbos in which they're stuck, contending with filial duty, personal desires, and whether beautiful buildings can actually help someone heal.

A little too studied in its smallness, Columbus can be burdened by the mannerisms of American independent cinema. Its beats are familiar, its arc is unsurprising. The should-I-stay-or-should-I-go plots, set on parallel tracks—one with mother/daughter, the other father/son—are little more than serviceable scaffolding for the movie's more engrossing musings on art and communion.

In Columbus, architecture takes the place of emotions, to sometimes startling effect. An outwardly chilly, resolutely static film that nevertheless finds poignancy in the most surprising places, Kogonada's directorial debut does a couple of important things so well that I can't help but forgive the things it doesn't.

Kogonada surveys the town's architecture with the exacting, worshipful eye that he's brought to analyzing the cinema of his heroes, and it's impossible not to wonder if Casey's awakening—her discovery of her right to live her own life and to create her own art—is representative of Kogonada's own drive to create. Like his video essays, Columbus is intensely occupied with the ways in which the space and symmetry of images reveal character and emotion.

It's intensely moving—only you have to be prepared to slip between the lines of its perfectly formed geometry to find the sources of its emotion... A strikingly distinctive film, and one of the best American debuts in ages. It is also unfashionably cerebral—but it's a manifesto for a cinema in which thoughtfulness, even intellectualism, is in no way exclusive of feeling, even of passion.

The film's merits are visual and dramatic: kogonada proves a highly skilled director of actors (stars John Cho and Haley Lu Richardson both deliver superlative performances, rich in nuance and feeling) and a stylist with an exceptional eye (his laser-precise compositions, framed around the modernist architecture for which Columbia, Indiana, is renowned, are positively stunning).