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NOVEMBER

Looking for Love: Grant and McCutcheon, two of Love Actually's cast of British all-stars.   (Photo: Peter Moutain)

Love Stories
Hugh Grant’s Love Actually isn’t just a romantic comedy. It’s ten romantic comedies in one.

This fall, if you’re dragged to one romantic comedy—either by a date or by the strange force that draws women toward Hugh Grant in weak-kneed heaps—let it be Love Actually. It’s the latest collaboration between Grant and writer-director Richard Curtis (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Notting Hill), and this time, they’ve upped the ante. Not content with one romance, Curtis scripted what co-star Laura Linney calls “ten different story lines about various forms and incarnations of love.” A cast of British all-stars (including Colin Firth, Rowan Atkinson, and Keira Knightley) plays twenty men and women looking for love in lovely London. Grant plays a prime minister who clashes with a redneck American president (Billy Bob Thornton) and falls for his office tea lady (Brit songstress Martine McCutcheon), while Linney gets mushy in an office run by Alan Rickman. “I had a line with Emma Thompson,” the normally restrained actress notes. Then she goes totally weak-kneed herself: “Hugh Grant and I were on the set at the same time!” —L.H.

• Details: Love Actually November 14 (Universal).

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At sea: Crowe as British Navy captain Jack Aubrey   (Photo: Stephen Vaughan/SMPSP)

Cap’n Crowe
In Master and Commander, Russell Crowe brings his commanding presence to the high seas.

‘Jack Aubrey is a grandly capable man, in charge of 197 souls on a 138-foot world,” says Russell Crowe. “Men like him were the nasa of their time.” As the brash, burly British Navy sea captain Aubrey, Crowe leads his crew on a globetrotting eighteenth-century chase for a massive warship that ambushed his own. Despite the film’s booming cannons, whistling shrapnel, and 800-odd special effects, Crowe swears Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World “is not an action film.” In fact, he pushed director Peter Weir (Dead Poets Society, Witness) for months to make the script more complex. “At first, Peter saw Jack as a simple man,” says Crowe, “but a man like that couldn’t have been.” The resulting commander, says Crowe, “has bad relationships and drinks too much, he uses too much profanity, and yet he generates love and authority.” Now, what would Crowe see in a difficult guy like that? Other than another shot at Best Actor. —L.H.

• Details: Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World, November 14 (20th Century Fox).

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Kahn ed: The architect's parliament building, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, intimately photographed by his son.   (Photo: Louis Kahn Project)

Dad Beat
Nathaniel Kahn’s haunting My Architect chronicles a son’s quest to understand his father.

Before he died penniless in Penn Station in 1974, Louis Kahn became the idol of a century of great architects—while secretly fathering children with two women other than his wife. My Architect follows the youngest Kahn offspring, Nathaniel, who was 11 when Dad died, as he nervously pumps those who knew Lou (including his mother) for information and travels the world to see his greatest works for himself. “To some extent, everyone’s parent is a mystery to them,” says Nathaniel, who took five years to make the picture. “And an investigation into any parent’s life is fraught with peril.” Astonishingly, this personal saga blossoms into a Citizen Kane–like meditation on whether anyone is truly knowable—but the showpiece is Kahn the younger’s spellbinding photography, which shows off his dad’s buildings’ epic grandeur as well as their spiritual intimacy. The apple, it seems, doesn’t fall far from the façade. “I had to keep going back,” Nathaniel says. “I got into a place where it was almost like talking to my father.” —Robert Kolker

• Details: My Architect, Film Forum, starting November 12.

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The Best of The Rest

The Matrix: Revolutions Part two left us wondering how Neo (Keanu Reeves) could manipulate the “real” world as he did the “machine” world. In the third installment of the Wachowski brothers’ sci-fi head-scratcher, it all becomes clear—we hope. (November 5; Warner Bros.)

Elf Will Ferrell takes on his first solo starring role as the now fully grown and very tall adopted son of one of Santa’s elves (Bob Newhart) who heads to New York in search of his biological father (James Caan). Zooey Deschanel (House Hunting) plays the department-store elf who falls in love with him. (November 7; New Line.)

21 Grams   (Photo: Jim Sheldon)

21 Grams Alejandro González Iñárritu’s follow-up to the emotionally harrowing Amores Perros is another intense—if more hopeful—story of intersecting lives: this time, a grieving mother (Naomi Watts), a dying math professor (Sean Penn), and an ex-con (Benicio del Toro). (November 14; Focus Features.)

The Cooler A contagiously unlucky man (William H. Macy) goes to work for a Vegas casino manager (Alec Baldwin) to thwart gamblers’ winning streaks. But the plan goes awry, in Wayne Kramer’s directorial debut, when the “cooler” falls in love with a cocktail waitress who turns his luck around (Maria Bello). (November 19; Lions Gate.)

The Barbarian Invasions   (Photo: Courtesy of Miramax)

The Barbarian Invasions Writer-director Denys Arcand’s story about a cancer-stricken historian (Rémy Girard) who spends his last days rabble-rousing with friends, making peace with his son, and scoring dope from a beautiful junkie won Best Screenplay honors at Cannes. (November 21; Miramax.)

Big Fish Tim Burton’s adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s southern novel revolves around a journalist (Billy Crudup) trying to understand his dying father (Albert Finney), a traveling salesman who keeps flashing back to tall tales he once told his son—about a swamp witch (Helena Bonham Carter), a circus ringleader (Danny DeVito), and a sheep-eating giant (the seven-foot-four-inch Matthew McGrory). Ewan McGregor plays the salesman’s imagined younger self. (November 26; Columbia.)

Bad Santa In a twisted fantasy that could only come from the mind of Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World; Crumb), an alcoholic thief (Billy Bob Thornton) disguises himself as Old Saint Nick to rob mallgoers, until he meets an introverted 8-year-old boy who, of course, teaches him the meaning of Christmas. (November 26; Dimension Films.)