After the Storm

Ryota Shinoda once won a literary prize, but his writing career never built on that early success. Fifteen years later he works as a private detective, scraping together fees from small cases and losing much of the money through gambling, which leaves him unable to keep up with child support. He is divorced from Kyoko, and their eleven-year-old son, Shingo, lives with his mother. Ryota's own mother, Yoshiko, lives alone. When the three of them visit her, a typhoon forces them to spend the night together under one roof, giving Ryota a chance to reconnect with the family he has drifted away from.

Hirokazu Kore-eda directed and wrote the film, the eighth of the sixteen features he has directed, following Our Little Sister and preceding The Third Murder. Hiroshi Abe plays Ryota, with Kirin Kiki as Yoshiko, Yoko Maki as Kyoko, and Taiyo Yoshizawa as Shingo. The production was handled by Fuji Television Network, Bandai Visual, AOI Pro. and BUN-BUKU, and the credited cast numbers twenty-five.

Released in Japan in 2016, the film runs 117 minutes. On IMDb it holds a rating of 7.4 from more than twelve thousand votes, and on TMDB a rating of 7.2 from several hundred votes, while a critics' rating stands at 8 out of 10 from 136 reviews. The audience scores sit close to each other across both platforms, and the critical rating is higher still, indicating a film received more warmly by reviewers than by the general viewers who have rated it.