It’s current day Japan, three generations of the Shibata family living together in a tumbledown shack in suburban Tokyo are finding it difficult to make ends meet. They resort to shoplifting, pooling their illicit gains. Things get more complicated when they take in a vulnerable young girl found shivering in the cold.
This Palme d’Or winner is another superb study of relationship and what family and love means from WFC favourite, Hirokazu Kore-eda, one of the great humanists of the cinema’ as Roger Ebert observed years ago. Shoplifters though serious in theme has more fun and warmth about it than some of the director’s other offerings (Still Walking, After Life, Like Father, Like Son).
A group of misfits carves out a marginal life for themselves in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest, and finest, feature.’ Joe Morgenstern, Washington Post