So you want to make a movie about a happy family with a burglar dad, swindler mom and three smiling kids who have no problems with what their parents do for a living? Surely the obvious — indeed only — approach to a film like this is to make it a black comedy.
Not if you are the makers of "At Home," Hiroshi Chono's misbegotten adaptation of Takayoshi Honda's titular 2010 novel. Instead of the expected laughs, the film bluntly aims to extract tears — and in this case, the "Japanese do it differently" explanation doesn't quite wash.
Yoichi Sai's picaresque 1995 comedy about a family of crooks, "Heisei Musekinin-Ikka: Tokyo Deluxe" ("Tokyo Deluxe"), has nary a sniffle in it. (Some may argue that as an ethnic Korean, Sai naturally took a dimmer view of Japanese than a "native" director. Not this reviewer — I can think of many such directors just as cynical.)