BROKER

 Movies like "Broker" should cement Hirokazu Koreeda's reputation as one of the best directors working today and certainly the best from Asia and like his earlier "Shoplifters" children and crime are at its centre. There a family provided love to an unwanted child while at the same time teaching her the art of shoplifting. Here the law-breakers are a couple of guys who 'kidnap' babies left by their mothers in an orphanage baby box, then selling them on for adoption.

There was a time when this would have been an outright thriller and the brokers would simply be the villains but Koreeda likes to dig deep below the surface. Ha Sang-hyun and Dong-soo, (Song Kang-ho and Gang Dong-won, both brilliant), may be in the brokering business for profit but at the same time they actually care for the children they 'steal'.

At the beginning of "Broker" a young mother abandons her baby and the brokers pick him up but then she goes looking for him, a journey that brings her into contact with his 'kidnappers' and into a relationship that is something like a family. There's something almost Dickensian in the intricacies of Koreeda's storytelling just as his cinema follows in the humanist footsteps of Renoir and DeSica.

Throw in a subplot involving a murder as well as two female detectives trying to catch the brokers redhanded in the act of selling a baby, marvellous performances from the entire cast, a surprising amount of gentle comedy and you have one of the best and definitely one of the sweetest films of the year.