Romantic comedies, especially those aimed at the lonely-gooey-hearts out there, rarely find a warm reception from me. Although I must profess that those starring Hugh Grant (Notting Hill, About a Boy, Bridget Jones) do set my steel-reinforced heart just a wee bit aflutter. So, I shuffled into Did You Hear About the Morgans? clutching an embarrassingly large bag of confectionary and shreds of hopeful expectation. Alas, if was not to be – the film was absolutely dismal. And Grant was just an ungracefully aging chap who delivered poorly written lines with about as much gusto as custard (the ones that come out of a box and have 0% eggs).

With past trophies like American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, a film by Sam Mendes has a statistically significant probability of transcending the realms of cheap laughs and light-hearted fluff. So you can imagine my surprise when Away We Go wasn’t a black hole of jaded cynicism and suburban disillusionment.

If anything, it was warmly funny and an interesting exploration of modern fears and hopes surrounding family, love and identity. It follows the journey (read: roadtrip) of a thirty-something American couple, Verona De Tessant (Maya Rudolph) and Burt Farlander (John Krasinski), who set out to find their uniquely own place to nest as they expect their first child. Along the way, they reconnect with a motley collection of friends and family, who show them what their life together could be but predictably enough, what their lives won’t be.

Foreign films can be a mixed bag of sweets, from crusty saccharine affairs to genuine glacé gems like Departures Okuribito). Directed by Yojiro Takita, this film gently probes at our modern contemplations of death. It follows the journey of Daigo Kabayashi (Masahiro Motoki), an ex-cellist who finds himself, accidentally, employed as an encoffineer (a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the afterlife). His personal epiphanies and intimate encounters with death are subtly and mirthfully used to explore the meaning of life and living.