Movies for When You've Just Moved to a New City: Five Films for the Weeks Before Your Heart Arrives

The mattress is on the floor because the bed frame is still in pieces somewhere in box number eleven. You don't know which switch turns on the hallway light, so you've been using your phone's flashlight to find the bathroom. The radiator clanks like someone is locked inside it. Outside, a bus you don't know the number of sighs to a stop, and for one weird second you miss a street you used to find boring.

Fall is moving season for a lot of us: new school, new job, new lease, a city you picked off a map or one that picked you. Nobody warns you about the in-between part, when your stuff has arrived and you haven't. In Paddington, an old shopkeeper puts it better than any moving guide: "My body had traveled very fast. But my heart, she took a little longer to arrive." Every film below is about that gap, and about the small things that close it: a song, a friend, a bag of chili flakes from home.

The list runs like a first night in a new place. It starts light, hits hardest in the middle, and ends with a girl on a broom finding her feet. Unpack the kettle first. Then press play.

1. Paddington (2014)

What it is: Paul King's live-action comedy about a small, extremely polite bear from Darkest Peru (voiced by Ben Whishaw) who stows away to London and ends up alone on a platform at Paddington Station, a tag around his neck that reads "Please look after this bear. Thank you." The Brown family (Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins) takes him home for one night.

Why it fits right now: Start here, because it's the funniest possible version of a bad first week. Paddington floods the bathroom, misreads the city's manners and keeps saying thank you to people who don't look up. King told MovieWeb that the team felt "a universality to the character, of being the outsider," and that every visual flourish was built around Paddington looking into a world he didn't quite belong to. Then the film quietly widens. Before he leaves Peru, Aunt Lucy tells him about the wartime children who were sent away for safety and left at railway stations with labels around their necks, and she hangs one on him. Listen, too, for the calypso band that keeps turning up on London street corners. King said that music meant a lot to him personally: it's immigrant music, made by people who came to Britain in the 1950s. The band is a chorus of people who already made this trip, playing the new kid in.

One scene to look for: Elevenses at Mr. Gruber's antique shop. A toy train chugs across the coffee table carrying the tea, and Gruber (Jim Broadbent) remembers another train, the one his parents put him on as a boy when there was trouble in his country. Paddington asks if it was hard to find a home. That's when Gruber says the line about his heart taking longer to arrive. It may be the truest thing a family comedy has ever said about moving.

2. Frances Ha (2012)

What it is: Noah Baumbach's black-and-white comedy, written with Greta Gerwig, who plays Frances, a 27-year-old aspiring dancer in New York. When her best friend and roommate Sophie (Mickey Sumner) moves out, Frances's life comes loose at every seam: money, work, love, and above all, where she sleeps.

Why it fits right now: Most moving movies are about one big move. This one is about the many small ones that follow, and it marks each with a title card showing Frances's new street address. Gerwig said she pitched telling the story in chapters, and Baumbach came up with the address cards. The black and white matters too. Gerwig said it gives the film an instant nostalgia, and added that "Frances would never think she was living in a glorious black-and-white world." That's the joke of a new city. You can't see the glamour while you're the one hauling a mattress up five flights. And when Frances flies home to Sacramento for Christmas, the parents meeting her at the airport are played by Gerwig's real mom and dad. Those minutes of tree-trimming feel like a warm bath.

One scene to look for: Frances running, skipping and spinning down a New York street to David Bowie's "Modern Love," a loving remake of a sequence in Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang. It's pure, unearned joy, the way you sometimes feel walking home in a city that isn't yours yet. Then stay for the very last shot. It's about putting your name on a new mailbox, and it finally explains the title.

3. Brooklyn (2015)

What it is: John Crowley's adaptation of Colm Tóibín's novel. Saoirse Ronan plays Eilis, a young woman from a small Irish town who crosses the Atlantic to 1950s Brooklyn, where a kindly priest (Jim Broadbent again, the patron saint of this list) has arranged a room in a boarding house and a job behind a shop counter. She is lonely, then less lonely, especially once a sweet Italian American boy named Tony (Emory Cohen) starts walking her home.

Why it fits right now: This is the emotional peak of the night, because no film takes homesickness more seriously as something that happens to your body. Eilis isn't sad in a pretty way. She's ill with it. Father Flood's diagnosis is the best advice in the movies: "Homesickness is like most sicknesses. It will make you feel wretched, and it will move on to somebody else." Ronan wasn't guessing at any of it. She was born in the Bronx; her family moved back to Ireland when she was three and a half, and she told RogerEbert.com the film is really her parents' story. She had also just moved to London at 19, and said there were times "when I just cried and cried because I was homesick." Watch her face whenever a letter from home arrives, and you'll see someone who knows the exact weight of an envelope.

One scene to look for: Eilis's first Christmas, spent ladling food at the parish hall for a room full of old Irish laborers with nowhere else to go, the men who built the city's bridges and tunnels and never went home. Father Flood asks one of them, Frankie Doran (the sean-nós singer Iarla Ó Lionáird), to sing. He stands and sings "Casadh an tSúgáin" in Irish, with no accompaniment, while the camera moves across the faces at the long tables and the song carries into the next scene. Keep a tissue close: you may see your own future in Eilis's face, and your grandparents' past in theirs.

4. Minari (2020)

What it is: Lee Isaac Chung's semi-autobiographical drama about a Korean American family in the 1980s. Jacob (Steven Yeun) moves his wife, Monica (Han Ye-ri), and their two kids from California to a trailer home on a patch of land in rural Arkansas, because he dreams of farming. Monica is not convinced. Her mother, Soon-ja (Youn Yuh-jung, who won the Oscar for this role), flies in from Korea to help, and their young son David decides she is not a real grandma at all.

Why it fits right now: For when the move wasn't entirely your idea, or when you're the one who talked everybody else into it. Chung told NPR's Fresh Air that the film began as a list of about 80 childhood memories. Two of them became its bookends: his father buying farmland without telling anyone in the family, and the patch of minari his grandmother planted, which turned out to be the only thing that really thrived on that farm. That's the quiet promise of the movie. The thing that takes root in a new place is rarely the thing you planned.

One scene to look for: Soon-ja unpacking her suitcase. Out come bags of Korean chili powder and dried anchovies, and Monica, who has held it together through everything, bursts into tears. Her mother teases her for crying over anchovies. Chung told NPR the moment never happened in his family; as he was writing it, the mother character simply began to cry, and he found it so funny and so true that he left it in.

5. Kiki's Delivery Service (1989)

What it is: Hayao Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli adaptation of Eiko Kadono's novel. In a world where witches live alongside everyone else, every young witch must leave home at 13 and make a life in a new town. Kiki takes off on a full-moon night with her black cat, Jiji, lands in a seaside city, rents a room above a bakery and starts a delivery business on her broom.

Why it fits right now: We end gently, but not falsely. Miyazaki deliberately gave Kiki a harder time than the book does, explaining that because movies feel more real, she "will suffer stronger setbacks and loneliness than in the original." That's why it works for the second month in a new place, when the thrill has worn off and the confidence you packed has gone missing. Kiki's version is literal: she loses the ability to fly and can no longer understand Jiji. Her new town has real roots: Miyazaki had visited Stockholm and the walled island town of Visby while chasing the rights to Pippi Longstocking, and Sweden shaped Kiki's city.

One scene to look for: Kiki's visit to Ursula, a young painter who lives alone in a cabin in the woods. Ursula figures out that Kiki's slump is a kind of artist's block, the same thing that happens to painters, and tells her she needs to find a new purpose rather than force the old one. It's the talk every newcomer needs from someone a few years ahead.

Before You Unpack the Last Box

Here's what these five films understand about a new city: you don't arrive on moving day. You arrive in pieces, over weeks. One piece comes with a song in a parish hall, another with a jar of anchovies, another the first time you fold your name to fit a mailbox. These films keep insisting that the loneliness is real and that it's also temporary, and that somebody on the next street over has felt exactly this.

So give your heart the extra time Mr. Gruber needed. If the radiator keeps you up tonight, our list of movies for when you can't sleep will keep you company until morning. And when you rewatch Minari, keep an eye on the spot by the creek where Soon-ja plants her seeds, then notice who walks down to it in the very last scene. More moods are coming; this is a series, and the next one might be for the night your new place finally feels like home.