Foreign

Eccentric inventor Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) and his faithful if often perplexed dog Gromit are back in their first feature-length adventure from animator Nick Park. Wallace and Gromit have launched a new business venture just in time for a major gardening competition in their neighborhood of West Wallaby. "Anti-Pesto" is a humane pest-relocation service in which Wallace and Gromit capture rabbits and other critters who have been eating the produce from local gardens and give them new homes somewhere else. Business has been going well, and when the woman hosting the garden show, Lady Tottington (voice of Helena Bonham Carter), discovers a massive tribe of rabbits has been making a mess of her garden, she calls in Wallace and Gromit to move the bunnies elsewhere. Wallace is quite taken with Lady Tottington, but he's not the only one -- Victor Quartermaine (voice of Ralph Fiennes) is a slick but arrogant upper-class type who wants to win Lady Tottington's hand (and fortune) and is convinced he can do a better job capturing the rabbits than Wallace. However, Wallace's attempts to brainwash the rabbits away from veggies using his latest invention has disastrous results, and soon Wallace has to deal with a beastly bunny as well as a heavily-armed Quartermaine. Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit followed Park's previous film with the duo, A Close Shave, by ten years, and was produced after Park broke through to mainstream success with the feature Chicken Run. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

All of London is in love -- or longing to be -- in Four Weddings and a Funeral writer Richard Curtis' first directorial effort. Billed as "the ultimate romantic comedy," Love Actually involves more than a dozen main characters, each weaving his or her way into another's heart over the course of one particularly eventful Christmas. The seemingly perfect wedding of Juliet (Keira Knightley) and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) brings many of the principals together, including heartsick best man Mark (Andrew Lincoln), who harbors a very unrequited crush on Juliet. There's also recent widower Daniel (Liam Neeson), trying to help his lonely stepson Sam (Thomas Sangster) express his true feelings to a classmate. Across town, devoted working mother Karen (Emma Thompson) tries to rekindle the passion of her husband, Harry (Alan Rickman), who secretly pines for a young colleague of his. In the same office, the lonely Sarah (Laura Linney) not-so-secretly pines for a man just a few desks away (Rodrigo Santoro), who returns her affections but may not be able to dissuade her neuroses. Providing the unofficial soundtrack for all of the couples is an aging rocker (Bill Nighy) who just wants to cash in and get laid -- but even he might find a meaningful relationship in the most unlikely of places. A working print of Love Actually premiered at the 2003 Toronto International Film Festival. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide