Film Friday returns! Under this month’s theme of contemporary Japanese films, we will be showing Like Father, Like Son, a family drama that is heartbreaking, joyful, and brilliantly acted. It was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize.

As reviewer Glenn Kelly wrote about it in 2014 on RogerEbert.com (he gave it four and a half out of five stars):

Kore-eda, whose pictures don’t exactly alternate between soulful, understated fantastic fables (“Afterlife,” “Air Doll”) and quiet family dramas (“Still Walking“), brings his trademark delicate but deliberate eye (and ear) to a really heartbreaking scenario. Six years into raising their only child Keita, whose birth left the young mother unable to have any more children, young couple Ryota and Midori are told that the child is not, in fact, theirs at all: that a hospital error switched two baby boys at birth. Soon the couple are meeting their biological child for the first time, along with the family that raised him.

As would not be unexpected in a domestic melodrama, the two families could not be more different. While Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama) is a cold-to-icy ambitious salaryman, next to whom Midori (Machiko Ono) sometimes looks resentfully dutiful, their biological son, named Ryusei, has been growing up with two young siblings, in a cozy raucous household whose tinkerer dad Yudai (Lily Franky) and ramen-restaurant-server mom Yukari (Yoko Maki) dote on their kids despite their limited means.

Friday, August 21, 8 pm

FREE