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Broker(브로커)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Korea · 2022
2h 9m
Director Hirokazu Kore-eda
Starring Song Kang-ho, Gang Dong-won, Bae Doona, IU
Genre Drama

Two brokers sell orphaned infants, circumventing the bureaucracy of legal adoption, to affluent couples who can't have children of their own. After an infant's mother returns to ensure her child finds a good home, the three embark on a journey to find the right couple, building an unlikely family of their own.

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What are critics saying?

91

IndieWire by

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.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by David Rooney

Much of this might have been formulaic in less artful hands, but Kore-eda has an unfaltering lightness of touch, a way of injecting emotional veracity and spontaneity into every moment.

100

BBC by Nicholas Barber

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.

40

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

The movie is fundamentally silly, with tiringly shallow characterisation and broad streaks of crime-drama intrigue, which only underline the fact that not a single word of it is really believable.

80

Variety by Peter Debruge

Kore-eda is surprisingly generous toward his characters, nearly all of whom are breaking the law, but whose fundamental decency is brought out when dealing with others in need.

80

Time Out by Phil de Semlyen

The hackneyed thieves-with-a-heart-of-gold trope is reinvigorated by the sharpness of the writing and Song’s Basset Hound charms. While Broker occasionally gets close to cloying, especially in its neat ending and jaunty score, Koreeda keeps it the right side of cutesy. It’s best enjoyed as a modern-day fairy tale – only, one where the abandoned baby sparks nothing but enchantment.

85

Vanity Fair by Richard Lawson

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.

90

Screen Daily by Tim Grierson

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.

40

The Telegraph by Tim Robey

All his usual strengths fail him in a different culture here, perhaps because the veneer of venal cynicism that ought to be the film’s top layer is so easy to scratch through. Digging for the pathos hardly takes us long, especially with one of the director’s most cloying scores handing over a shovel.

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