Critics reviews

A sad little melting snowman is meant to encapsulate their solitary disappearances, a banal and sentimental image not up to the film’s story and actors.

The lightness and matter-of-fact clarity of Kore-eda’s directorial touch belie the careful intricacy of the film’s construction and the affective intensity of its political indignation.

Shoplifters alternates between tender and sobering observations, and the frequent alternations keep the movie unpredictable. Kore-eda doesn't just change the emotional register from scene to scene, but within individual scenes; he also manages these shifts so gracefully that they never feel jarring.

The rhythms of Hirokazu Kore-eda's Palme d’Or-winning “Shoplifters," may seem random and mysterious at first, filled with gaps, but it has its own internal logic, it pulls you into its flow.

Underneath its crowd-pleasing appearances, this slowly engrossing film hides an uncompromising defense of chosen bonds over inherited ones, open-hearted generosity, and life outside the stifling rules of capitalism. That’s some surprise stuffing for you.

The family, Kore-eda’s great subject, is something that persists, with its lingering resentments and resilient bonds. This makes the ending of Shoplifters all the more devastating. The final image of a lonely child is the strongest illustration of the family’s importance, felt most keenly in its absence.

It’s an utterly absorbing journey, not least because as viewers we have to pay attention to every little nuance of behaviour and seemingly throwaway aside (why does the ringleader want his little apprentice to call him ‘papa’?).

It’s a predictably bleak snapshot of alienation, but Kore-eda also makes it devastating.

With Shoplifters, Kore-eda’s agenda is audacious, uncovering exquisiteness and refinement in ruin and squalor.

These moments don’t prepare us for the unsettling revelations about the characters’ pasts that we get in the last half hour. Even here, though, the details of behavior remain indelible. One astonishing shot turns a cinematic staple—a woman trying to wipe away tears—into a tour de force of facial performance by Ando Sakura.

The twisty drama is at once traditional in its neorealist narrative of survival under adversity as a necessary process of self-fashioning, and utterly modern in the way Kore-eda pulls no punches about the upshot of their charade.

Shoplifters’ win might not be indicative of any sort of institutional shake-up, but that doesn’t discount it from being a Palme-worthy pick. Even though the second act closes with a melodramatic contrivance, Kore-eda undercuts the treacle with a darkly comic turn. It’s in this third act that Shoplifters rises above the quiet domestic dramas of the rest of his oeuvre and becomes something far more bitter.