Critic Reviews

Broker keeps on getting funnier and knottier as secret motives are revealed, sympathies shift, mysteries deepen and dangers multiply. It is, on one level, a farcical crime caper, but it is so elegantly plotted that it never seems contrived.

Absorbing and heartwarming, it’s easy to forget that this tender drama is about human trafficking.

This is a moving drama about people pushed together by fate who end up not merely helping each other survive but elevate through an increasingly harsh world.

Every baby deserves to be loved and taken care of, but so does every adult. Broker does an impressive job of articulating how these two truths are inextricably intertwined.

It’s one of the master’s most transparent and — when it comes to confrontations about what parents, and specifically women, can or should do for themselves and for the babies they are forever bound to — brave films of his career.

As often with Kore-eda’s pictures, Broker is about family, but it extends beyond that theme to talk about fundamental aspects of life — the need to belong, the hope of connecting with likeminded souls, and the desire to find a place called home.

Kore-Eda, remarkably, doesn’t counterfeit a happy ending, but he also refuses despair. He’s an honest broker of heartbreak.

Kore-eda’s nonjudgmental approach to all his films is what makes him such an enticing auteur, and with Broker he brings what he excels at to a new destination with an all-star South Korean cast that really understands his material and delicate subtleties.

Broker marks another minor miracle from writer-director Hirokazu Kore-eda, featuring another one of his makeshift families.

Gentle, sad, and funny in a just-shy-of-cutesy way, Broker continues Kore-eda’s tradition of handling tough subject matter with a light touch.