Imagine you’re the parents of an adorably well-behaved six-year-old boy. Then the hospital calls and tells you that in fact, your child was switched with another family’s when they were born—your biological son has been raised by somebody else. What do you do? That’s the conversation-sparking premise behind Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s brilliant new melodrama Like Father, Like Son, playing now in limited release.

My review is at Film Racket:

There’s a Lifetime movie lurking not far beneath the deceptively placid surface of this cutting family drama about a Japanese couple who discover that their six-year-old son is actually somebody else’s. Now, not only do they have to come to terms with the realization that their son is not related to them, but that their biological child is still out there, waiting to be met. What is their real son like, and if they haven’t raised him, what makes that boy their real son and not the one they’ve been creating a family with? Over the course of its smartly plotted two hours, writer/director Kore-Eda Hirokazu’s emotionally knotty film raises question after question about this interruption of what seemed initially like domestic bliss. The biggest of them being: Does any of this even matter?…

Like Father, Like Son strangely missed out on this year’s foreign film Oscars, but won the Jury Prize at Cannes, where Steven Spielberg saw the film and nabbed the rights for a perhaps inevitable American remake by Dreamworks.

Here’s the trailer: