Rather good... actually

Richard Curtis, screenwriter of Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill, has made a triumphant directing debut at the Toronto Film Festival with Love Actually.

Although billed as a work in progress with some dubbing to be completed, the audience was delighted with the film, which interweaves eight love stories.

Hugh Grant is one of an ensemble cast, although as the new British prime minister he naturally attracts the most attention. Who is more bouffant, Grant or Tony Blair? There the similarities end.

This PM is a dashing bachelor, and within minutes of entering Downing Street he falls for the curvaceous young woman who brings the tea (Martine McCutcheon).

She lives with her mum and dad at the dodgy end of Wandsworth High Street, and tends to spout salty language like Eliza Doolittle with Tourette's Syndrome. Curtis juggles his stories deftly, somehow managing to link them without making the contrivance too irritating. The action takes place over the four-week run-up to Christmas, when true love is supposed to assert itself.

The cast list is long and talented. Alan Rickman plays a man married to Emma Thompson who is besieged by an overtly desirous secretary. Colin Firth is a thriller writer two-timed by his girlfriend, who decamps to a villa in the south of France and falls for the Portuguese cleaning girl.

Newly widowed Liam Neeson finds his 11-year-old son pining for a girl at school.

Bill Nighy, a comedy veteran, excels as a washed-up old rocker whose awful Christmas song "Christmas is all around" is trashed by him on Radio Watford, before he exposes himself on Michael Parkinson's programme. ("That'll never make No 1" is Parky's comment.) Rowan Atkinson delivers a cameo as Selfridge's most exasperating sales assistant.

It is no surprise that everything comes right in the end with ingenious plot-boiling.

Toronto is now the best testbed for new films and offers a discriminating, knowledgeable local audience that doesn't mind queuing round the block if the wait is worth it. These are the people who spotted American Beauty and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Because it is on the same continent as Los Angeles and an hour or so from New York and Chicago, and English is spoken, the festival attracts more stars and film-makers than any other. This year 63 films are having their world premieres, including Curtis's £23 million movie.

Will Mr Blair be invited to the British premiere on 21 November? "We'll ask him but he'll probably have other things on his plate," said producer Duncan Kenworthy.