The actors, young or old, transform themselves fully to make what some may regard as their “unexamined lives” worth living, worth recounting, and for observers, worth admiring for their internal fortitude, honesty, and resulting sagacity.

| Feb 25, 2025

Hirokazu Kore-eda is one of my favorite directors working today and he did not disappoint with Shoplifters.

| Aug 7, 2024

You feel like you’re watching the lives of real people as the story grows and sprouts. It makes the smaller moments of bonding, such as a trip to the beach, all the more charming. Yet it also makes the eventual truths all the more shocking.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 14, 2024

The best movies teach you something you may not have already considered, and Shoplifters might do just that for many people, especially families.

| Original Score: A | Jul 2, 2024

Kore-eda favors the intimate and subtle over big drama, and this film is filled with both touching and heartbreaking moments of affection and disappointment.

| Aug 19, 2023

Shoplifters is a tender film about a family comprised of thieves, murderers, kidnappers, scammers, and liars.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 4, 2022

Episode 23: Vox Lux / The Guilty / Shoplifters / The Mule / Rififi

| Original Score: 76/100 | Sep 3, 2021

Director/writer Hirokazu Kore-eda handles the film with a pragmatic yet empathetic eye and as a result, crafts together one of the year's best movies that clutches the heartstrings by the time the credits roll.

| Oct 2, 2020

For the underprivileged, the concept of family can be as extended as necessity mandates [Full Review in Spanish]

| Sep 19, 2020

Shoplifters tells a story about love, family, crime, and truth. It's life itself without the morality cloak. One of the best movies of 2018. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 9/10 | Aug 30, 2020

Shoplifters shows us that family is simply a concept, a social construct that has little to do with genetics and instead springs from love and sacrifice.

| Jul 23, 2020

Kore-eda offers an intimate view of a poverty-stricken Japanese family from ground level, where the ground is continually cut from underneath their feet.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 23, 2020

This is a harrowing, elegant, and graceful piece of art that is easily one of the best offerings of the year.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jul 13, 2020

The film supposes another master work in the filmography of the Japanese director, full of periodic emotions and dramatic moments of great intensity of which I leave moved to the guts when I witness a family. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 8/10 | Jun 27, 2020

[SHOPLIFTERS] is top-notch Kore-eda with a Farhadi-esque moral dilemma and fantastic, nuanced filmmaking that never spoon-feeds the audience and presents its story in graceful, absorbing ways.

| Jan 19, 2020

While this has the potential of becoming a bleak melodrama, Kore-eda ensures the story retains a sense of poignancy and emotionality.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 8, 2019

With Shoplifters, Koreeda embarks on an ambitious philosophical journey to explore the fundamentals of family. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 10/10 | Nov 4, 2019

"Shoplifters" is a genuine Koreeda film, a masterful family drama, and of his best latest works, which definitely says something considering the quality of all of his films.

| Oct 27, 2019

It's accessible, fluently told and packs an unexpected punch.

| Oct 17, 2019

Filled with a compassionate, profound and intelligent narrative that never leaves you for a second, Shoplifters is the best film of the year and a perfect swan song to Kirin Kiki who literally gets buried in a Kore-eda household.

| Original Score: 5/5 | Sep 26, 2019