About Shoplifters
A makeshift Tokyo family — a day laborer, a laundry worker, a hostess, an old woman, and the boy they have been raising as their own — find a small girl shivering on a balcony and quietly fold her into their household. Kore-eda lets you spend a hundred minutes loving them before he asks the questions the film really came to ask.
Released in 2018 and running a tight 2h 01m, Shoplifters sits firmly in the crime tradition that American art-house cinemas have spent the last two decades quietly defending. The film is rated R and presented in Japanese, with English subtitles at participating venues.
Director: Hirokazu Kore-eda
Hirokazu Kore-eda belongs to the cohort of directors whose work tends to land first at festivals — Sundance, Locarno, the New York Film Festival, SXSW — before opening on a small handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles and then rolling out, week by week, to the independent circuit elsewhere in the country. Shoplifters is part of that pipeline. It is the only title from Hirokazu Kore-eda currently in our directory; if you want to keep tabs on the director's other work, follow festival-circuit coverage from the outlets that track independent distribution.
Cast
The principal cast — Lily Franky, Sakura Andô, Kirin Kiki — is the kind of ensemble that art-house audiences will recognize from adjacent festival titles. Independent casting tends to favor performers who can carry a long take, hold a quiet scene, and trust a director's control of pace; this film is no exception.
Where to watch Shoplifters
Our seasonal catalog — an editorial sample of the circuit, not a live ticketing feed — places it at independent cinemas in 12 US cities. Coverage is deepest in:
- Minneapolis, MN — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Portland, OR — listed at 3 independent cinemas.
- Houston, TX — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- San Diego, CA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Rochester, NY — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Seattle, WA — listed at 2 independent cinemas.
- Narberth, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Grove City, PA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Marion, IA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Carlsbad, NM — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- Winchester, KY — listed at 1 independent cinema.
- San Jose, CA — listed at 1 independent cinema.
If your city isn't on the list, the film may still surface on a future repertory week or festival weekend; check our full cinema directory.
Why it belongs on the indie circuit
The independent and art-house exhibition circuit exists to surface films like this one — work that doesn't fit the wide-release calendar, doesn't have the marketing budget of a studio tentpole, and depends instead on programmers, critics, and word-of-mouth to find an audience. Shoplifters is a clean fit for that model: a 2h 01m crime work, made outside the studio system, that benefits from being seen on a real screen with a real audience rather than queued up on a streaming dashboard. The cinemas in the cities listed above are the venues doing that work for this title.
Cross-references
If you are building a viewing schedule around this film, our Crime genre hub indexes adjacent work in the same tradition.