“Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters sneaks up on you. It starts out as a low-key charmer akin to the filmmaker’s Still Walking or After The Storm, but then about an hour into this placid portrait things begin to unravel, undercutting the audience’s assumptions and steadily accumulating great weight and moral severity. By the time it ended I was a wreck.” – WBUR’s The ARTery, 11/30/2018