A film that just grows and grows and grows. It seems very quiet, but you are absolutely hooked.

[Shoplifters] is a film edged by despair, and yet is life-affirming. Families may disintegrate, but love keeps us ticking over.

Writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda fills the film with grace notes, humor and fine observations, circling and filling out each character while leaning more on innocence than corruption.

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.