For the last decade, Hirokazu Koreeda has been world cinema’s metronome, ticking off empathetic masterpieces with virtuosity so efficiently it is perhaps too easy to take for granted. His run of eight films from 2008’s Still Walking to last year’s Shoplifters was capped with a well-deserved Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Whether he is observing fathers or sons, sisters or widows, murderers or shoplifters, his films avoid pat generalizations or easy excuses. To watch a Koreeda film is to live with the characters, forming judgments based on witnessed behaviour rather than expository excuses. Like many of Koreeda’s films, Shoplifters is able to convey both the intense pains and unmatched joys that come from being part of a family, whether adopted or biological. The emotional alienation and isolation that is so prevalent in literary modernism doesn’t give way to black humour in Koreeda’s films the way it does in so many postmodern works. When there is joy, it is genuine, coexisting with pain rather than gilding over it. The parable of the Good Samaritan concludes with Jesus asking his listeners which person acted like a neighbour. Shoplifters invites its viewers to wrestle with the question of which character acts like a father.
– Kenneth R. Morefield
- Directed by: Hirokazu Koreeda
- Produced by:
- Written by: Hirokazu Koreeda
- Music by:
- Cinematography by: Ryûto Kondô
- Editing by:
- Release Date: 2018
- Running Time: 121
- Language: Japanese
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2018 Top 10 — #5