Shoplifters
Magnolia Pictures | Release Date: November 23, 2018 CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION
93
METASCORE
Universal acclaim based on 40 Critics
Positive:
40
Mixed:
0
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews

Critic scorePublicationBy date
100
The Seattle TimesMoira MacdonaldDec 10, 2018
Just as it lulls you, it also devastates. Read full review
100
Boston GlobeTy BurrNov 28, 2018
It’s in theory the worst family movie of 2018 — and in practice one of the year’s best films. Read full review
100
Wall Street JournalJoe MorgensternNov 23, 2018
Tolstoy got it wrong and Shoplifters gets it right. All happy families are not the same. Hirokazu Kore-eda’s enchanting, subversive masterpiece takes on family values and bourgeois pieties through a Japanese crime family that is not what it seems. Read full review
100
RogerEbert.comBrian TallericoNov 23, 2018
For the bulk of Shoplifters, Kore-eda works in a beautiful register that feels both detailed and genuine at the same time. We get to know these characters so deeply, watching them all at their jobs. Read full review
100
The New York TimesManohla DargisNov 23, 2018
In the past, Kore-eda’s delicacy has at times enervated his movies. Here, though, the family’s toughness, thieving and secrets, its poverty and desperation, work like ballast on his sensibilities. In their grubby imperfections, Kore-eda finds a perfect story about being human. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesKenneth TuranNov 21, 2018
This wise and insightful film is delicate, poignant and unexpectedly powerful. Read full review
100
SlateInkoo KangNov 20, 2018
For all its gentle groundedness, a quality that suffuses much of Kore-eda’s work, Shoplifters strenuously resists romanticizing its main characters. Its compassion is more convincing for it. So is its brilliance. Read full review
100
San Francisco ChronicleDavid LewisNov 18, 2018
Master director Hirokazu Kore-eda, whose work won the Palm d’Or at Cannes this year, doesn’t pour on the emotion. He doesn’t need to – his film, even as it enchants, is quietly devastating. Read full review
100
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)Simon HouptSep 8, 2018
The director, though, reaches in and steals your heart right in front of your eyes, like a magic trick, and you have to admit you didn’t even see it coming. Read full review
100
New York Magazine (Vulture)Emily YoshidaJun 5, 2018
Every scene adds another onion-skinlike layer, adding density and mass so slowly that you hardly notice the emotional weight of it all until it is suddenly overwhelming. Read full review
100
Los Angeles TimesJustin ChangMay 21, 2018
A tender ensemble piece whose skillful performances dovetail into a perfectly symphonic whole, "Shoplifters" is a work of such emotional delicacy and formal modesty that you're barely prepared when the full force of what it's doing suddenly knocks you sideways. Read full review
100
Screen InternationalLee MarshallMay 19, 2018
Some of the credit must go to the stellar casting and performances. It’s difficult to single out one of the six actors in this alternative family unit as it’s a true ensemble display. But Kore-eda’s deft command of tone is a key factor too. Read full review
100
VarietyMaggie LeeMay 19, 2018
At once charming and heart-wrenching, this exquisitely performed film will steal the hearts of both art-house and mainstream audiences. Read full review
100
CineVueJohn BleasdaleMay 19, 2018
A quietly devastating portrayal of family and theft in contemporary Japan. Read full review
100
The GuardianPeter BradshawMay 19, 2018
It is a movie made up of delicate brushstrokes: details, moments, looks and smiles. Read full review
100
The TelegraphRobbie CollinMay 19, 2018
Shoplifters is compassionate, socially conscious filmmaking with a piercing intelligence that is pure Kore-eda. This is a film that steals in and snatches your heart. Read full review
95
The AtlanticDavid SimsDec 12, 2018
The final act of Shoplifters, like all of Kore-eda’s best work, is devastating. After seeing the director tease out every strange bond in this makeshift group, investing his audience fully in their future, one finds it that much harder to watch when things fall apart. Read full review
91
Entertainment WeeklyLeah GreenblattNov 15, 2018
Kore-eda is working up to something else, steering the story he’s built so carefully toward an utterly unexpected detour. As much of what we think we know unravels, the film becomes not just an enjoyable, intermittently poignant portrait of imperfect people but a profound meditation on the meaning of family. Read full review
91
IndieWireDavid EhrlichMay 19, 2018
A master of threading the needle between conflict and contrivance, Kore-eda manages to turn this drama inside out without every betraying its most resonant truth. Read full review
90
Rolling StonePeter TraversNov 21, 2018
It’s impossible to experience the deep-seated compassion of this film and not be moved to tears. Read full review
90
The Hollywood ReporterDeborah YoungMay 19, 2018
This small film is a thoughtful addition to his parables about happy and unhappy families (Nobody Knows, After the Storm), studded with memorable characters and believable performances that quietly lead the viewer to reflect on societal values. Read full review
89
Austin ChronicleRichard WhittakerJan 3, 2019
Yet in many ways Shoplifters is an unlikely yet organic extension of his last film, 2017's crime drama "The Third Murder." Less a whodunit than a whydidyoudoit, that legal procedural was really a subtle assault on Japan's judicial system, in which it's more important that a case makes sense than it reaches the truth. Shoplifters cuts close to the same marrow as "The Third Murder," but with how Japan views families as his subject. Read full review
89
Paste MagazineAndrew CrumpDec 11, 2018
Shoplifters is held up by the strength of its ensemble and Kore-eda’s gifts as a storyteller, which gain with every movie he makes—even in the same year. Read full review
88
ReelViewsJames BerardinelliDec 10, 2018
Like Kore-eda’s previous masterpiece, "Like Father Like Son," the movie uses a domestic drama to illustrate larger and more compelling concerns about society in general. Read full review
88
LarsenOnFilmJosh LarsenDec 5, 2018
Shoplifters definitely goes after your heartstrings, yet especially after some third-act revelations put this family in a larger social context, the movie earns any tears it gets. Read full review
88
Movie NationRoger MooreNov 15, 2018
Shoplifters, winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a film acted with great sensitivity, a rough story delicately told. Read full review
88
Slant MagazineChuck BowenAug 30, 2018
In Shoplifters, Kore-eda dramatizes the insidious and relativistic ordinariness of poverty. Read full review
87
TheWrapBen CrollJun 1, 2018
Not only does Shoplifters skillfully entwine several disparate threads he’s explored over his prolific career, it does so with the understated confidence and patient elegance of an artist who has fully matured. Read full review
83
Christian Science MonitorPeter RainerDec 1, 2018
Kore-eda’s slow reveal of who these people are, and what they mean to each other, has its mystery story aspects, but this is essentially a character study, or at least it tries to be, and not a puzzle picture. He fills in each of the main players leisurely, in snatches. Read full review
83
Consequence of SoundRandall ColburnNov 24, 2018
It’s moving stuff, even if Kore-eda threatens to dilute his themes by overindulging in them. Shoplifters overstays its welcome somewhat as the third act rolls on, with an epilogue that seems to exist only to absolve characters that don’t quite deserve it. The empathy is admirable, but one wishes for a touch more restraint, especially in the wake of such an emotionally devastating climax. Read full review
83
The A.V. ClubMike D'AngeloNov 20, 2018
What these people have in common beyond a shared surname really pounds the film’s theme home with a sledgehammer, but there are numerous tender, affecting moments en route to the finale’s tearjerker overdrive, many of them productively tangential to the overarching idea of choosing one’s own family. Read full review
83
The PlaylistJordan RuimyMay 25, 2018
Trying to pick apart his native country’s struggles between tradition and modernity, legality and crime, Kore-eda takes the time to affectionately dissect the way family functions, before carefully deconstructing it and revealing the contoured complexities that live within. Read full review
80
The Observer (UK)Mark KermodeNov 29, 2018
It’s an eerily moving piece, masterfully blurring the divide between the unforgivable and understandable, finding tenderness in the bleakest and most traumatic of circumstances. Read full review
80
EmpireDavid ParkinsonNov 28, 2018
The spirits of the old masters pervade this disquieting but deeply moving drama. But Kore-eda stands alone as the chronicler of family life in a country facing an identity crisis. Read full review
80
CineVueMaximilian Von ThunNov 28, 2018
What Kore-eda wants to convey to his audience is that good and bad are never absolute, and that good and bad themselves have a reality above and beyond that of man-made laws. Read full review
80
The New YorkerAnthony LaneNov 19, 2018
The secrets unveiled in the movie’s second half are mostly wretched, and Kore-eda, in his steady and unhectoring way, is levelling grave accusations at Japanese social norms, yet what stays with you, unforgettably, is that bundle of mixed souls at the start. Read full review
80
Time OutGeoff AndrewMay 24, 2018
Boasting excellent performances all round (with the writer-director once again demonstrating his expertise with children), Shoplifters is another charming, funny and very affecting example of Kore-eda’s special brand of tough-but-tender humanism. Read full review
75
Washington PostAnn HornadayDec 12, 2018
With its air of intimacy and fractious affections, Shoplifters feels like “The Borrowers” by way of Yasujiro Ozu, a discreetly observed drama about resourcefulness, loyalty and resilience in an era of obscene income inequality and a fatally frayed civic safety net. Read full review
75
The Associated PressLindsey BahrDec 5, 2018
A slow but captivating burn that may leave you questioning your own hard-set ideas of right, wrong and family. Read full review
75
The Film StageRory O'ConnorMay 19, 2018
By drawing our empathy for such morally dubious and potentially damaging characters, Shoplifters remains a real heartbreaker, the kind of which only this director seems capable. Read full review
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