Love Actually: Critic Reviews

It's going to make a lot of holiday romantics feel very, very good; watching it, I felt cozy and charmed myself.

A patchwork of contrived naughtiness and forced pathos.

This kind of comedy has just hit the wall.

Love Actually is irresistible.

If listing the cast of Love Actually is exhausting, it's even more tiring to watch it.

There's enough that's right about Love to compensate for what's wrong with it.

Love Actually will delight moviegoers who think that more really is more. Cynics who prefer their twee without sugar are advised to look elsewhere.

When he isn't overreaching for absurdity, Curtis can write bouncy patter, but each character gets about 60 seconds before the movie jumps deck to the next love-seeker and the next moony pratfall.

Curtis throws every gag he can think of at the screen and the ones that don't stick, he throws again and again.

Curtis shows the same eccentric humanism and charm that gave him Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill.

The creators of Love Actually clearly believe that if a movie has enough charm, it doesn't need depth. In the case of Love Actually, they are absolutely right.

Love Actually won't last you. Still, while you're enjoying it: Yummy.

A highly engineered puffball.

The movie's only flaw is also a virtue: It's jammed with characters, stories, warmth and laughs, until at times Curtis seems to be working from a checklist of obligatory movie love situations and doesn't want to leave anything out.

Individually, the tales wouldn't stand up as short stories. Together, they make for sporadically amusing, ultimately wearying viewing.

This is cloying, deceitful, and more or less irresistible.

Love Actually is just about impossible to dislike, even if you really, really want to.

A warm, benevolent comedy whose characters gradually become your dear friends.

Perfectly wonderful if not completely perfect.

Love Actually plays like a greatest-hits album of modern British comedy, spinning all your favorite tunes in just the right order.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed the movie until, in the end, it went somewhat bonkers with what amounted to a communal love fest on Christmas Eve.

This movie is so unfunny, uninspired and unoriginal I swear it could have started out as a club-footed Coen Brothers vehicle for George Clooney.

A roundly entertaining romantic comedy, Love Actually is still nearly as cloying as it is funny.

Slick but uneven romantic comedy.

It's too busy with too many stories to tell. But there's so much heart and silly fun and genuine sentiment here, delivered by an A-list of Brit and American talent that it's hard to fault.