Shoplifters

A makeshift household in a cramped Tokyo flat survives on part time wages, a grandmother's pension, and goods lifted from local shops. On a cold night the father and his young son find a small girl alone outside and bring her home, where she is quietly absorbed into their routines. As the seasons pass, the warmth of the arrangement sits beside a lingering question of how these people came to live together.

Kore-eda works in a patient, observational register, letting the household's economy and tenderness accumulate before the story turns. Reviewers singled out the ensemble, and Sakura Ando in particular, for work of great restraint and feeling. The film took the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2018 and reached the Academy Award shortlist for international features.

For a psychodynamic clinician, the film offers a study of chosen bonds set against the ties of birth, and of what sustains attachment when blood and law pull in other directions. It observes how care, habit, and shared need can knit strangers into something that functions as kinship, and how fragile that holding can prove.