Rating: 
Summary: A shining example of a "feel good" film!
Review: Twenty minutes into this movie, I laughed out loud. From that point on, I never stopped smiling.
It's now three days later and I haven't stopped smiling.
A movie you want to wrap your arms around and hug, "Love Actually" is an anthology of love stories involving over a dozen people set in modern pre-Christmas London.A woefully incomplete list:
Hugh Grant, the new young British PM, falls for his tea server. Newly widowed Liam Neeson bonds with his young stepson. The stepson is hopelessly smitten by a girl in his class named Joanna. Emma Thompson plays the PM's sister, married to Alan Rickman. He is disaffected with his home life, and is flirting with the idea of flirting with his secretary. Laura Linney works for Rickman, and has a crush on a co-worker, but her life is complicated by a mentally ill brother. Two adult film stand-ins develop a sweet relationship while hanging around nude and simulating sex so the film crew can set up for the real deal. The adult film directors' roommate heads to the U.S. because all U.S. women are hot, and they all want to have sex with English men.
Supposedly.
Keira Knightly is a newlywed who discovers someone else may be drawn to her. Bill Nighy steals the film as an aged rock star, angling for the Number One spot on the charts. Writer Colin Firth obsessing about his new Portuguese housekeeper. Well, you KNOW how this movie is going to end. You really do. It's no surprise.
If it didn't end the way you THOUGHT it would, it would suck.
It's like music. You expect verse-chorus-verse, maybe a guitar solo here or some background vocals there, but the overall pattern is constant. It's the CONTENT that sets it apart. This film is SO funny, with so many loops and asides, you'll be giddy. It's smart and sweet and heartwarming, all in the best way without being sappy or cloying. This film is LOADED with uncredited guest stars. I won't spoil all the fun (there's at least a half dozen) but when the daughter from the TV show "24" showed up, I giggled. Get a load of the guy who plays the President of The Unted States. An absolute hoot. The soundtrack is astonishing. An absolutely perfect melding of pop songs/performances to situations. Eva Cassidy's 'Songbird" is appropriately aching. The Beach Boys "God Only Knows" soars. The movie ends with a Christmas pageant performance bringing many (if not all) of the characters together, and little Joanna brings down the house. While it is a romantic comedy, not every tale has a conventional or happy ending. Some are, yes, but others are bittersweet. Unrequited love. Familial love. The love between best friends, or old friends.
Puppy love, which if you think about it, may be the purest form of true love. You just like somebody, and you don't know or care why. You just do and that's it.
The love of sex. The love of possible sex. Love AFTER sex.
Love of parents, children, brothers, sisters, co-workers and colleagues; the love of cultures, of tradition, of language... So I guess the overall theme of the film really is just love, actually.
Rating: 
Summary: A lot less than I expected
Review: There were a few funny moments and a few aaahhh moments but they were few and far between. The boredom in between and the grade school potty humor were much more noticeable. Try to rent it if you want to see it. Not worth buying.
Rating:
Summary: It's not what you think and it's more than you expect
Review: If you've only seen the American trailer for this film, you are probably expecting a very different movie than what will arrive in your mailbox. The trailer made this look like a fluffy feel-good comedy with one central plot, and not much more. But you'll find much more than that in Love Actually. If you want something to make you laugh, cry, think, ache and swell with emotion, this is the one for you. You WILL find a bit of yourself in one of the movie's excellent characters. If you want a movie you can watch without thinking, this also isn't for you. You need to be a tiny bit smart and observant to enjoy this I think. I have only very minor complaints about the movie...subtle changes that would have rounded out the few rough edges. Most every line of the Portuguese sister should have been cut. Instead of comic relief they took away from the scene. In certain scenes the way the shot is set up makes what's about to happen too predictable. That said, the screenplay is phenomenal, as are the actors. Maybe I'm too sentimental, or maybe I love British film and television too much to be an unbiased American reviewer. But I think this film is more than a pretty package. Watch it and then watch it again. I did and I loved it even more the second time. The posterboard "flashcard scene" is worth the price of admission. The soundtrack is great. The Seinfeld way it all ties together is brilliant. And also in the Seinfeld vein, if your friends ask you what the movie is about, you can say "nothing" and mean it. I mean, it's about love. But there's no plot. It's just actually just love. Or love, actually. Lots of nudity and language, definitely not for the kids.
Rating:
Summary: I Loved This Movie!!!
Review: I have actually liked all of Richard Curtis' movies. This one though has been my favorite. This movie offers several different story lines with some of today's most talented actors. Colin Firth finds love with a girl that dosen't understand English, and he can't speak Portuguese but that doesn't stand in their way. Hugh Grant is the PM of England and finds love with one of his members of household. Can a PM find love at Christmas time? Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson are a married couple that is truly tested by a possible affaire. Laura Linney finds love with a co-worker but has family responsiblities that play a large part in whether the relationship will work. Liam Neeson is a stepfather that finds himself helping his stepson who is experiencing love for the very first time. This is a very heartwarming movie demonstrating that love can be found anywhere, at anytime, for anyone! This movie will make you laugh and cry, and truly believe in love!
Rating:
Summary: I just didn't GET it
Review: I am surprised at all the hoopla about this movie. Got through the first couple of scenes and turned it off. It seemed to be nothing but a bunch of blah blahblah.....we watched Calendar Girls instead..now that movie ROCKS!
Rating: 
Summary: Hmm it's ok...
Review: LOVE ACTUALLY did not really live up to my expectations. Sure there were charming moments, but like other movies, too much going on. There's too much filler in this movie for it to be completely enjoyable. Especially since some of the couples had little or no resolution whatsoever. It features a star studded cast including Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Emma Thomson, Laura Linney, and others. The movie centers around different couples, ones that fall in love instantly, others that find love with other people, and others that want love from a certain person but cannot have it. There's some funny moments, even touching, but a lot of the movie was unnessesary. Like the aging pop star, the British young man who goes to America to find sex, etc. The movie is unrealistic in some ways, but maybe that's what it was supposed to be about, the underlying theme that love is all around us. It's a fun romantic comedy, not the best, but it has it's moments.
Rating: 
Summary: Blech! Cuter than a dumptruck full of kittens.
Review: Did you ever see that "Love Is" comic strip which Homer Simpson once described as about "two naked kids who are married"? Love Actually is like that cartoon, just as complex and sophisticated, except smothered in honey and sugar, with a maraschino cherry on top, surrounded by dancing kittens and bunnyrabbits, as cherubs hover in the air humming. In short, it is so overly sweet and cuddly that it makes you ill just looking at it. Even if you love romantic films--I mean, really _LOVE_ romantic films--this one is going to make you sick to your stomach. For starters, the music that plays on the index screen of the DVD is the kind of romantic Muzak that accompanies late-night computer dating commercials on television. Everything else in the movie and on the DVD is just as sappy and overdone. The film tries so hard that it is scary. One suspects that the writer and director really have some issues to work out with a therapist--as if they think they have finally discovered true love and happiness after marrying their third wives. The movie is about all the wonderful, mysterious, glorious ways that "love" enters our lives, and if that description doesn't make you groan, then read some of the blurbs that they stuck on the DVD box (any critic who calls a film "the feel-good movie of the year!" should be put out to sea in a rowboat with no oars). The movie starts with a narration by Hugh Grant telling us that love is everywhere and the proof is that all those people who made phone calls from the planes hijacked by the terrorists on 9-11 were calling loved ones. Those were not calls of hate, we are told. If you think about that a little bit you can see how seriously off-track this movie was right from the start. Many of those calls were filled with terror and fear, and some of them were not made to loved ones but to law enforcement. And how can one use this event to "prove" that love really is all around us when, if anything, those hijackings proved the immense power of hatred? Besides the overly sentimental and sugary tone of the entire movie, there are some other serious problems with this film. For one thing, it is too long. It clocks in at over two hours and clearly doesn't have enough story to support that length. In fact, there is no single plot that drives the movie from the beginning to the end. There is no real story, only a bunch of loosely-connected vignettes, each about five minutes long and quickly moving out of the way for the next one. What it has instead is characters, lots of characters. Way too many of them, actually. They are all supposed to be connected in some six-degrees-of-separation kind of way. But this is a contrivance and we only find out that several of them know each other near the end, when they run into their friends at a school concert or the airport. It's a lame way of saying that we are all connected. But so what? The movie would have been better to drop several of them and focus more time on a fewer number of characters that it could better flesh out--and tell real stories about, rather than how they each fell in love. One gets the sense that nobody was willing to rein in this director and tell him that his movie had gotten out of control. Does he really need that many characters? Do they really all need to be connected? Do we really need a cameo by Denise Richards just so that we can laugh at the end and say 'Hey, look! It's Denise Richards!'? And why the heck didn't someone tell him that having two actor stand-ins for an adult film constantly mimicking sex is simply _not_ funny? No matter how hard he tried, the director could not make a couple of naked people making chit-chat on a movie set seem cute. (One almost has to feel sorry for these two actors, because when the movie inevitably gets edited for television, ALL of their scenes will be the first to go.) In fact, that sense of a runaway production is reinforced by watching the deleted scenes on the DVD. These are introduced by the director and he reveals that his first cut of the movie came in at about three hours and twenty minutes and all of the scenes that got cut are among his favorites--including not one, but _two_ scenes shot of peasants in Africa proving that "love really is everywhere." Watching them, it's clear that he had little self-control. One wishes that somebody from the studio had told him to eliminate several of his actors and a bunch of the subplots and tighten the film up so that it had a point other than that love surrounds us, everywhere. I'm not being a curmudgeon. I enjoy the occasional light romantic comedy (and I liked Notting Hill, which was an earlier work done by the people who brought you Love Actually). But this movie gives treacle a bad name.
Rating:
Summary: a huge disappointment
Review: The only reason I give this three stars is that Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, and Emma Thompson gave such great performances. If the film had focused only on their three stories and as a result allowed them to develop more fully, it would have been a great film. I saw absolutely no point in the story line of the aging pop star, the idiot Colin who goes to America looking for sex (and, amazingly, FINDS it! If he had found a sweet Wisconsin girl who fell in love with him, that would have been OK, but as it was, it was beyond disgusting), or the couple who meet apparently while working as stand-ins for porn stars. Way too many characters. Keira Knightly, Laura Linney, and Hugh Grant have mildly interesting story lines, but only because you like the actors. And frankly, I don't even understand why the filmmakers bothered paying Rowan Atkinson for the annoying little bit part he had.
As for the "America bashing," we do that plenty here in the U.S., thank you, so why should we complain that the Brits do it? A bit hypocritical if you ask me. Let them bash away--it's their prerogative, and it has nothing to do with the quality (or lack thereof in this case) of this movie.
There were so many story lines that I may have actually missed a couple of them here--it was too much to take on in one film, and it wasn't a success. Still, it's worth the rental for the performances of Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, and Colin Firth--and especially the little boy who played Liam Neeson's stepson.
Rating:
Summary: Average Brit RomCom
Review: This movie does exactly what it says on the tin. It's sugary, uncomplicated fluf, but never pretends to be anything else. As for the reviewer complaining about what he calls 'U.S' bashing - first of all this is a British movie reflecting a non U.S opinion, which makes a change from the patronising pro-US/Land of the free/God bless America tripe that Hollywood seems determined to force down everyone's throats at every turn.
At the end of the day, this is an average Christmas feel good movie.
Rating:
Summary: Pass on this one.
Review: This is one of those movies that you really want to like, because it's always on the cusp of being funny...but then isn't. Also, the nasty little U.S. bashing politics should've been left out. I found it offensive. Liam Neeson is wonderful, as always, but the movie is definitely a "rental" only.
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