Pretty excited to keep working my way thru the Kore-eda filmography in 2020, his movies were consistently among the best I watched in 2019, and there are still like eight or nine more that he wrote/directed out there.

Between these and Still Walking (2018), they all seem to be ensemble movies “about” family or group dynamics during moments of broader transition, with a huge range and depth on both the visual and character levels, overlaid on an idiosyncratic approach to plotting that’s “slow” and unpredictable and dramatically rich. They’re so good that I’m spacing out my viewing, saving them for special occasions. A very rough comparison might be, imagine a good Altman movie, but with a more deeply-felt and focused attention on slightly fewer characters, and set in (mainly) contemporary, heavily-articulated quotidian situations, and without any “movie style” antagonists.

Shoplifters seems to be the clearest entry point and the hardest-hitting, and I’d recommend it to really anyone trying to watch “an actually-good movie” any day of the week. From there I’d say Hana‘s retelling of “the 47 Ronin” (which doesn’t focus on the ronin really at all) feels like the most straightforward expression of the storytelling modality at work across these movies, and might work as a kind of key to them, and Still Walking is the finest. But again they all seem to be great and I can’t wait to keep going here.