Starring Lily Franky and Sakura Ando,[2] it is about a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with a life of poverty.

Kore-eda wrote the screenplay contemplating what makes a family,[4] inspired by reports on poverty and shoplifting in Japan.

[13] In Tokyo, a family lives together in poverty: Hatsue, an elderly woman who owns the home and supports them with her deceased husband's pension; Nobuyo, who works for an industrial laundry service; her husband Osamu, a day laborer forced to leave his job after twisting his ankle; Aki, who works at a fetish club; and Shota, a young boy.

One cold night, they see Yuri, a neighborhood girl they regularly observe locked out on an apartment balcony, and bring her home with them.

The family learns on television that after almost two months, police are investigating Yuri's disappearance; her parents never reported her missing.

Osamu steals a purse from a car, making Shota feel uneasy since he considers this theft against their moral code.

Yuri is returned to her parents, who continue to neglect her, and looks wistfully back at the house she shared with the family.

Director Hirokazu Kore-eda[14] said that he developed the story for Shoplifters when considering his earlier film Like Father, Like Son, with the question "What makes a family?

[16] With this story, Kore-eda said he did not want the perspective to be from only a few individual characters, but to capture "the family within the society", a "wide point of view" in the vein of his 2004 film Nobody Knows.

[4] He set his story in Tokyo and was also influenced by the Japanese Recession,[4] including media reports of how people lived in poverty and of shoplifting.

[5] To research the project, Kore-eda toured an orphanage and wrote a scene inspired by a girl there who read from Swimmy by Leo Lionni.

Kore-eda said, When I visited an orphanage, a little girl took the picture book Swimmy out of her backpack and suddenly started to read it.

[29] In China, the film grossed $14 million,[3] in what The Hollywood Reporter called "an unprecedentedly strong performance for an imported pure arthouse drama".

[31] In its tenth weekend of release in the United States and Canada, following its Oscar nomination, the film made $190,000 from 114 theaters, for a running total of $2.5 million up until then.

The website's critical consensus reads, "Understated yet ultimately deeply affecting, Shoplifters adds another powerful chapter to director Hirokazu Kore-eda's richly humanistic filmography.

[39] The Hollywood Reporter critic Deborah Young called it "bittersweet" as it "contrasts the frigid emotions of socially correct behavior with the warmth and happiness of a dishonest lower-class family".

[40] Robbie Collin of The Daily Telegraph awarded it five stars, hailing it as an "outstanding domestic drama, crafted by Kore-eda with crystalline insight and an unsparing emotional acuity".

[41] For IndieWire, David Ehrlich gave it a grade of "A−" and wrote the film "stings" with "the loneliness of not belonging to anyone, and the messiness of sticking together".