The least interesting of the Richard Curtis/Hugh Grant trilogy.

Rating: 5/10 (16 March 2011)

In its day (1999), the most successful British film ever. NOTTING HILL arrived in cinemas and on video in 1999 as the follow up to FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL: it featuring the same star (Hugh Grant), producers and screenwriter (Richard Curtis). The director this time is Roger Michell. It's the weakest of Curtis's trilogy of Hugh Grant/London comedies (the other being LOVE ACTUALLY).
Grant plays William, a modest London bookseller who falls in love with Hollywood goddess Anna (Julia Roberts, really playing a version of herself) currently working in the capital. A better movie might have been made about the relationship between Grant his scruffy lodger Spike (Rhys Ifans) - a sort of contemporary odd couple since Spike steals every scene he appears in. Instead, we get a predictably clean, summertime and glossy London that is purged of any parochial references the Americans might not understand. When the film fails to interest us, it is kept alive by a good supporting cast including Gina Mckee, Emma Chambers and Hugh Bonneville. Best moment is a coup-de-cinema where the passage of six months is evoked by a single tracking shot of William walking through a street market whilst the climate turns from sun to rain to snow to sun and a pregnant woman at the start of the shot is a mother at the end of it. It's a quite wonderful and utterly cinematic moment in a film which is never more than acceptable from a screenplay designed to appeal and charm.