‘Broker’ is a road-trip movie gift from overseas

Above : Song Sang-ho (center) stars in Hirokazu’s film “Broker,” which is scheduled to open Friday at the Magic Lantern Theatre. (Photo/Neon)

As usual, some of the best films are coming from across the ocean. I’m being purposely vague because good films tend to be targeting us from whatever direction we look.

In the case of “Broker,” which is scheduled to open Friday at the Magic Lantern Theatre , the ocean I mean is the Pacific.

Written and directed by Japanese filmmaker Hirokazu Koreeda , “Broker” follows a group that is trying to, at least at first, take advantage of a woman who has abandoned her baby.

A couple of guys pick the baby off the steps of a church and see an opportunity to make some money. Others become involved, and the police begin a pursuit, and yet – as New York Times critic A.O. Scott wrote – Koreeda’s film “recall the neorealist magic of Vittorio De Sica.”

“His characters are silly, suffering, dignified creatures, on whom the audience’s sympathy descends like grace,” Scott wrote.

Randy Myers of the San Jose Mercury was equally complimentary. “What could have been a train wreck if it were an American comedy/drama,” Myers wrote, “turns into a funny, sad, brittle, beautiful and absolutely strange odyssey wherein the image of family gets distorted and reimagined in the most touching way imaginable.”

And Ella Kemp of IndieWire added, “The execution of this premise is, somehow, miraculous in its sensitivity, asking questions about issues of ethics, of choice, of money, and murder, and family, and how to find love in all this sorry mess.”

Final note: Song Kang-ho , the Korean actor who plays one of the baby thieves, won the Best Actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival.