I would say it's much worse than that. Most laptops have less than about $30 worth of audio components inside and even the best ones probably no more than $50 or so. With the exception of cell phones, the sound out of laptops represents about the poorest audio quality money can buy! There's simply not enough space for decent speakers in a laptop and they can't physically reproduce low frequencies.
In short, NO. Although I've done it elsewhere, I'll explain why and then I'll try and suggest the best work around for under $1k.
Cinema sound systems represent about the highest quality sound systems most people will ever get to experience. The front 3 speakers are all full range (20Hz - 20kHz), plus the subs in many cinemas often go as low as 15Hz. Most laptops cannot reproduce frequencies much below about 80Hz and some can't reproduce anything below 120Hz. This means that you can be happily mixing away on a laptop, completely oblivious to the fact you might have quite a bit of material at say 50Hz (which would be inaudible on your laptop) but could blow the heads off the audience in a cinema (say at a film festival). The ONLY way of knowing what your mix is going to sound like in a cinema is to reproduce the size, acoustics and sound systems found in cinemas, this is why all the theatrical mix rooms are so incredibly expensive to hire. Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts or ways to cheat or work around this fundamental fact, period! The best you can do is get as close to this scenario as possible, the closer you get, the more chance your mix has of translating well when played back in a cinema. Obviously a laptop is about as far away as you can get from a cinema and is therefore about the worst thing you can use to create a mix destined for a film festival.
But obviously there are ways you can improve what you're doing compared to using the worst equipment possible (a laptop). The first thing you can do is to spend about $200 on a set of professional headphones. You usually sit many meters away from the speakers in a cinema and the impact on sound reproduction of the acoustics of the mixing environment/cinema cannot be over stated. So in this regard headphones are in fact the worst thing you can use for mixing because the speakers are about an inch or less from your ear and the stereo positioning and frequency response of headphones is going to be completely different to what you will hear in a cinema. However, good quality professional headphones do offer the cheapest way of hearing content in the low frequencies. You won't get a good idea of the balance of the lower frequency content but at least you can hear it, which is a lot better than hearing nothing, as would be the case on a laptop! Headphones are also good at reproducing fine detail, useful for editing dialogue and identifying clicks, other spurious sounds and mismatched room tones/edits which you would otherwise miss on anything other than a very highly specified sound system. There are quite a few headphones marketed as "professional" (which aren't) and there are also quite a few which are actually professional grade, it's often difficult to figure out which is which. My recommendation would be for something like the Sennheiser HD 380 Pro which list at $200 but you might be lucky to find at $160 or so.
That leaves you with about $800. For this I would get as good a set of nearfield monitors as you can and economise with making your own acoustic treatments for your room, remembering that 50% of the performance of speaker/monitors is the acoustics of the room they are in. You are not going to get anything for this money which will get you even vaguely into the same ball park as a cinema system, even from just the frequency range they are able to reproduce (usually no lower than 40Hz - 50Hz), let alone the room size, acoustics or balance but this is the best you can do, unless you start putting one or more zeros on the end of your budget. Baring in mind that what you are trying to achieve with speakers is a synergy with your room size and acoustics. without knowing these variables it's impossible to recommend anything specifically. It's worth knowing that the pro ranges of Blue-Sky, Genelec and JBL tend to dominate the audio post market but there are good products from Adam, ATC and others in the $500-$600 price range. With the remaining $200-$300 spent on DIY acoustic treatment.
The workflow would be to do most of the sound editing on headphones and most of the mixing on speakers, checking your mix with headphones for obvious low frequency foul ups. If you are going to be distributing on the web, then by all means also check the mix sounds OK on a laptop. Whatever you do with this budget though, your mix is going to sound quite different when it gets to the cinema but at least you can get rid of many of the most elementary mistakes and hope that different doesn't mean terrible!
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