They live in a ramshackle home, and they’re something of a ramshackle family. Along with aging grandmother Hatsue (Kirin Kiki) and elementary school-age Shota (Kairi Jo), Osamu and Nobuyo Shibata (Lily Franky and Sakura Ando) also make room for Hatsue’s twentysomething granddaughter from a former marriage (Mayu Matsuoka). As if that didn’t make things crowded enough (their garden apartment seems comprised of a series of closets), Osamu and Nobuyo decide to take in a little girl (Miyu Sasaki) from the neighborhood after she’s abandoned by her mother. This unconventional family unit manages to survive by scraping together low-paying jobs and, as the title implies, engaging in petty crime. Even Shota helps on that front, filching from food markets alongside Osamu. (Writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda stages their shoplifting routines as if they were choreographed dance numbers.) As in Kore-eda’s last film, After the Storm, Kiki nearly steals the movie with her open portrayal of a woman losing the battle against age and time, while Franky and Ando balance each other nicely. (He has a sad clown face that simultaneously captures the family’s highs and lows, while she has an easy smile that—in one incredibly moving scene—starkly disappears, causing her to repeatedly touch her eyes and cheeks in search of it). Sasaki is unbearably cute as the would-be orphan, which speaks a bit to the movie’s penchant for sentimentality. 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.
