<em>Shoplifters </em>Is a Brilliant Dickensian Tale for a Modern Age
A triumph at Cannes earlier this year, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s film is a quietly devastating drama about a family living on the edges of Japanese society.
is, very quietly, a film about a crisis. The Shibata family comprises three generations crammed together into a small home—the adults earn low wages; work menial jobs; and struggle to feed, clothe, and educate the kids. This family, and their lives, could easily be framed in the dreariest way possible, and the writer and director Hirokazu Kore-eda has about wanting to use his film to address the widening class divides in Japan, which have a warm, heartfelt, and engrossing experience that’s entirely deserving of the Palme d’Or it won at Cannes this year.
