Love Actually

Love Actually may well be manipulative, simplistic and shriekingly sweet in its giddy message that love is to be found everywhere, but as a romantic feel-good comedy it is irresistible. You simply leave the cinema in a good (Christmas) mood.

Love Actually depicts the difficulties of love in a series of small stories that are woven in and out of one another but are only loosely connected. You will be sorely disappointed, though, if you are expecting complex and challenging dramas of fate as in Robert Altman's "Short Cuts", but you will undoubtedly be entertained.

Richard Curtis, who also wrote the screenplay for "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and is now directing for the first time, confidently opens with a scene that refers to his own hit film. The ageing rock singer Billy Mack is to record a special Christmas version of the hit "Love is all Around", which enjoyed a renaissance when Wet Wet Wet recorded it for "Four Weddings and a Funeral". Billy has an exceedingly cynical attitude to Christmas, the record industry and people in general, but surely that will be turned upside down in the course of the film?

Hugh Grant is on top form as a newly appointed Prime Minister who falls head over heels for Natalie, one of the staff at 10 Downing Street, which is hardly fitting. His older sister, played by Emma Thompson, rightly suspects her husband, the editor Harry, of infidelity, and the question is whether she can forgive him?

Richard Curtis may well have been given a little too free a hand, for a running time of well over two hours is more than most comedies can bear, and cutting a plot strand or two would hardly have done any harm.