“Love Actually” is all around

“Love Actually” DVD box set is utterly charming and irresistible romantic comedy.

An ensemble comedy on the theme of love in all its variations, this London-set film deals with numerous different interlinked relationships. Hugh Grant plays a new Prime Minister who falls in love with the Number 10 teagirl (an impressive and natural big screen debut from Martine McCutcheon). His sister Emma Thompson worries whether her successful husband (Alan Rickman) is having an affair with his secretary. Meanwhile in Rickman's office, Laura Linney yearns for the love of the chief designer. Colin Firth decamps to France when he finds his wife is cheating on him with his brother, and finds love - despite a language barrier - with his Portuguese housemaid (Lucia Moniz). Liam Neeson struggles to help himself and his son over the death of his wife. Keira Knightley, Andrew Lincoln, Rowan Atkinson and Billy Bob Thornton have round out a star-studded cast.

The movie has such inevitable situations as a school holiday concert, an office party, a family dinner, a teenage boy who has a crush on a girl who doesn't know he exists, and all sorts of accidental meetings, both fortunate and not. Richard Curtis always involves a little sadness in his comedies (like the funeral in "Four Weddings"), and there's genuine poignancy in the relationship of a recently widowed man (Liam Neeson) and his wife's young son by a former marriage (Thomas Sangster). Their conversations together have some of the same richness as "About a Boy."

Anyway, this is one of the most beautiful and heartwarming movies to come around in years with involving plotlines, top notch directing, and excellent acting from an all-star cast. I love it.