Alan Barnes Movies
- 2007
Director James Killough takes the helm for this short film about a most unusual encounter in the Tate Britain. Helen is wandering the corridors of the vast museum when she begins to suspect that a creepy security guard is tracking her every move. Her pace quickening, Helen enters the Romantic Painting Gallery and befriends a young girl named Jenny. Jenny is a child artist who is waiting for her father Carson - a well-known artist himself - to return. Feeling safe with the young girl, Helen sits down. As the pair awaits the return of Jenny's father, the young girl tells Helen a surreal story involving a feral child named Cat. When Jenny's father returns from the restroom, he invites Helen to join him for a walk through the museum. Along the way, Carson and Helen bond by exchanging stories of their disastrous marriages: Carson's wife was a drug addict who suffered a fatal heroin overdose at one of his shows, and Helen's husband mysteriously vanished with the couple's young children in tow. Later, after Helen agrees to sit for a portrait by Carson, the artist and his daughter have an unsettling encounter on their way out of the museum. ~ Jason Buchanan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alan Barnes, Catherine Walker, (more)
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
- Starring:
- Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, (more)
