ROMANTIC COMEDY; 1hr 43min
STARRING: Bradley Cooper, Natalie Portman, Blake Lively, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci
DIRECTED BY: Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Randall Balsmeyer, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, Shekhar Kapur, Joshua Marston, Mira Nair, Natalie Portman & Brett Ratner
Room service: Christie and LaBeouf
New York is an endlessly inspiring city. So what snappier way to get a sense of its angles and energy than to check them out in bite-sized, thematically linked anecdotes, à la the multifaceted Paris, Je t’Aime? Each of the 11 romantic segments in New York, I Love You has a different, highly stylised take. But the theme that ties them together is a need for connection in a city too jazzed on itself to so much as think about sleep.
Characters appear and reappear with whimsical randomness as the mood segues from the playful (Ethan Hawke and Maggie Q spar in an Ivan Attal–directed, one-upping encounter; Anton Yelchin and Olivia Thirlby take on tree sex in Central Park, courtesy of director Brett Ratner) to the bizarro (Julie Christie and Shia LaBeouf push realistic boundaries with director Shekhar Kapur). The cast is cool value even in the weaker links that invariably make up such a diversified daisy chain. But it was always bound to be “the capital of everything possible” that would steal the scene every time.
