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The first directorial effort from Richard Curtis is the kind of relentlessly optimistic romantic comedy you’d expect from the writer of Four Weddings and a Funeral. For his series of loosely related vignettes that explore the ways in which different kinds of love actually are all around us, Curtis assembled a stellar cast. Hugh Grant does his charmingly raffish act as the new prime minister of England with a crush on his maid; Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson are moving as a couple whose marriage is falling apart. On the downside, a plot involving a recently widowed Liam Neeson and his stepson, who is smitten with a classmate, is grating, mainly because Thomas Sangster as the lovelorn Sam is the kind of child actor who seems to have been conceived in a Hollywood test tube. Fortunately for Curtis, the rest of his actors, who include Laura Linney and Colin Firth in unsentimental portraits of people in love, bring his material back to earth.
BY BROOKE HOLGERSON
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