RICHARD Curtis keeps on writing the same movie about love. This time not only does he get to write it, but direct it too, and with no one to stop him, he writes not one love story, not four love stories with a funeral tossed in, but eight, maybe nine love stories in a Christmas wonderland.

With Curtis, life revolves around London, and while his London is not as rose tinted as the double-decker bus and red phone box portraits of the capital in American movies, it is still a sanitised version.

We know Curtis's milieu very well, too well, by now: it always features a bumbling, charming Hugh Grant and awkward Colin Firth in need of romantic redemption; dysfunctional families; top British and guest American totty; uncomfortable English family gatherings, weddings or in this case Christmas; and great dollops of love among the English upper-middle classes.

Curtis rounds up all manner of relationships from past cinema, including his own works, and sets them in that most cynical and over-emotional time, the lead-up to Christmas Day. He then places them in chocolate-box London or one of those snow-cloud scenes in a glass bubble.

In the sad corner stands Liam Neeson, newly bereaved and seeking to teach his love-struck son lessons in puppy love; Laura Linney, torn between an office fling and the responsibility of caring for her sick brother (why can't she find room for both?); and Andrew Lincoln, the best man fixated on his best friend's new bride, Keira Knightley.

In the charm and cor blimey corner stands High Grant as the new Prime Minister who falls for his Eliza Doolittle tea girl, Martine McCutcheon, whose below-stairs status is represented by her liberal swearing.

Meanwhile, jilted novelist Colin Firth is seeking solace from a broken marriage by escaping abroad, where he develops a tongue-tied, unspoken love for his Portuguese house maid.

Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman aren't communicating either, their marriage in trouble from lack of attention to each other's needs and too much attention from one of Rickman's office girls (whose punishment in Curtis's world is to spend Christmas alone).

Thompson's portrait of a lonely mother, trying to keep family together while falling apart herself is the most honest storyline in this otherwise sticky confection.

Adding too many ingredients to the Christmas pudding, Curtis has porn movie stand-ins falling in love and an ugly duckling Cockney chancer striking it lucky with American booty.

Stir in the heart-tugging soundtrack, and Love Actually is superficially enjoyable but manipulative and shallow, its cynicism mirrored by scene-stealing Bill Nighy's rock dinosaur Billy Mack, in pursuit of the Christmas number one spot with his re-heated doggerel, Christmas Is All Around.

Updated: 09:38 Friday, November 21, 2003