Parents' Guide to

Love Actually

By Nell Minow, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Romantic and entertaining -- for older teens.

Movie R 2003 135 minutes
Love Actually Poster Image

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Community Reviews

age 16+

Based on 40 parent reviews

age 13+

Watch it without kids first to know what it is

This movie is inspiring but you need to know what is in it. Yes there is sex and a bit of nudity. Mostly boobs. But the scenes about the porn movie is actually quite sweet - they start as strangers and fall in love while working. There is context missing from other reviews. It's framed as just another workplace romance. Love can happen in lots of places. Thats the point.

This title has:

Great messages
3 people found this helpful.
age 18+

Hugely Disappointed

My friends suggested this was a great romantic Christmas movie. I was extremely disappointed. Felt like a movie made by teenage boys who needed to emphasize a girls breasts, sex, bad language and poor taste. The opening idea on love was good, the music soundtrack excellent, the closing good, and the one father son relationship was cute. The rest was trash.

This title has:

Too much sex
Too much swearing
Too much drinking/drugs/smoking
2 people found this helpful.

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say (40):
Kids say (70):

This romantic comedy is as stuffed with goodies as the Christmas stockings for those at the very top of Santa's "nice" list -- and it is just as entertaining, too. Richard Curtis, who wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill for the first time directs his own screenplay with heart and style. It helps, of course, that he has a dream cast, including newcomer Sangster, a real-life cousin of Hugh Grant and already a first-rate actor and a knock-out screen presence. Each of the actors creates complete, endearing, vivid, and vulnerable characters that we will remember long after we have forgotten most "stars" who spend two full hours onscreen in the latest multiplex fodder.

Love Actually is a movie about taking big chances (both hopeful and hopeless), about making big gestures to show our love, and about big, big feelings that may make us crazy and miserable but remind us that we are alive and why we are alive. In addition, any movie that manages to include a child dressed as a Nativity lobster, a Bay City Rollers song played at a funeral, love-emergency lessons in both drums and Portuguese, and Hugh Grant dancing through the halls of 10 Downing Street to the Pointer Sisters is worth seeing at least twice.

Movie Details

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