Romance

Role Play

  • Title: Role Play
  • IMDb: link

Role Play

Role Play is a mediocre romcom mashed-up with a so-so thriller for forgettable results. Kaley Cuoco stars as international assassin who has managed to keep her job a secret from her husband (David Oyelowo) for the better part of a decade until, in an attempt to spice up their marriage, the pair do some role playing in an upscale hotel bar which sets a series of dominoes in play that expose our assassin’s line of work and the organization whose head (Connie Nielsen) is hunting her.

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Fallen Leaves

  • Title: Kuolleet lehdet (Fallen Leaves)
  • IMDb: link

Fallen Leaves

Written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki, Fallen Leaves gives us two lonely souls (Alma Pöysti and Jussi Vatanen) wandering  in and out of each others lives, and various jobs they each work to get by in modern day Helsinki. By a series of circumstances, some of which they control, others of which they cannot, and many of which border on comical, they are kept apart for most of the film.

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In Love and Deep Water

  • Title: In Love and Deep Water
  • IMDb: link

In Love and Deep Water

Set on a cruise ship, In Love and Deep Water merges a romcom about a pair of jilted lovers who come together after realizing their significant others are cheating with a murder mystery aboard the ship. The romcom angle works fairly well with the life of the buttoned-down butler (Ryô Yoshizawa) thrown into chaos after the arrival of Chizuru (Aoi Miyazaki) who showed up to catch her boyfriend and Suguru’s girlfriend together only to realize to late that the pair aren’t on the ship and finding herself stuck on the cruise for several days. The pair bond over both their misfortune and investigating the murder which occurs on the ship (which is where the film runs into problems).

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Elemental

  • Title: Elemental
  • IMDb: link

Presented with less fanfare than any Pixar movie I can remember, Elemental answers the question of what a Disney version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner would look like. Similar in many ways to Zootopia, Elemental offers an unusual city of characters, this time elemental beings of fire, water, cloud (air), and tree (earth), attempting to live together in peace with an undercurrent of racism and bigotry bubbling just below the surface.

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Love in Taipei

  • Title: Love in Taipei
  • IMDb: link

Adapted from Abigail Hing Wen’s 2020 novel, Love in Taipei is a coming of age story centering around introverted pre-med student Ever Wong (Ashley Liao) in the summer after her high school graduation being sent from Ohio to Taipei to take part in an exclusive summer cultural program which the students call Loveboat because of all the partying and hooking up that goes on during the summer.

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