← Like Father, Like Son
Like Father, Like Son poster

Like Father, Like Son · reception & legacy

2013 · Hirokazu Kore-eda

How Like Father, Like Son has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

A Jury Prize winner at Cannes 2013 and Kore-eda's biggest domestic hit to that point, it was his international breakthrough moment — though since Shoplifters swept the Palme, it's settled into 'the gateway Kore-eda' slot, warmly loved but no longer the one people lead with.

What's debated

The perennial Kore-eda debate crystallises here: is this his most emotionally piercing film or his most schematic — a premise so neatly engineered that some fans call it the closest he's come to conventional melodrama?

Its footprint

Famously, Steven Spielberg — who headed the Cannes jury that awarded it — had DreamWorks snap up the remake rights, and cinephiles have been half-dreading, half-anticipating the Hollywood version ever since (it never materialised).

Where it stands

A fixture of the 'films that will destroy you' and 'movies about fatherhood' lists on Letterboxd — the entry-level Kore-eda that quietly recruits people into working through his whole filmography.

★ Did you know? Kore-eda has said the film grew out of his own guilt as a working father: after a long shoot away from home, his young daughter treated him like a polite stranger — reportedly telling him 'please come again' — and the sting of that moment fed directly into the script.