SnoopyStyle Will Francis (Jude Law) opens a new architecture office in the transitioning London neighborhood Kings Cross. He and his girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright Penn) are growing distant and her autistic daughter Bea is one of the reasons. Meanwhile Amira (Juliette Binoche) is worried about her son Miro (Rafi Gavron) slipping into criminal activity. They're from Bosnia and his father was killed during the war. Miro is teamed up with his cousin Zoran (Ed Westwick) in the family crime business. They break into Will's office to steal computers. Miro steals the valuable miniatures for his own artistic work and is given Will's personal computer as a reward. They rob the place a second time and Will's partner Sandy (Martin Freeman) almost runs into them. Detective Bruno Fella (Ray Winstone) investigates. Will and Sandy decide to stake out their own offices and encounter prostitute Oana (Vera Farmiga) working in the area. One night, Will catches Miro and follows him all the way home. Instead of directing the cops to the thieve, he starts a relationship with his mother.This is written and directed by Anthony Minghella. I have no specific problems with the directions. It is all about the writing. It is overloaded with class warfare melodrama. Everybody has their own dramas. There is just too much. That's not to say there is nothing worthwhile. Binoche is amazing in this. If this is a simple movie about her and her son, this could be an award worthy performance. Again there are so many characters who each have their own drama. Minghella could easily cut out Sandy and Oana. Quite frankly, I couldn't care less about Will and his family drama either. The complicated melodrama is simply too complicated.

secondtake Breaking and Entering (2006)Underrated. The acting is so good, and the story so interesting and not quite familiar (even if it uses some familiar ideas), and the way it is filmed and told so expert, it's hard to see why there aren't more people appreciating this. I really liked it, and was never distracted and disappointed.First there is Jude Law, a nuanced actor who rises above his reputation as a pretty man. He manages to come off as a self-absorbed jerk with a nice interior, then as a truly good man, then as a tortured adulterer. And some things between, all restrained and quite believable in a proper, well-educated London scene. Against him and even more astonishing (as usual) is Juliette Binoche, playing a Bosnian immigrant with a troubled son. Binoche's accent, to an American ear, and her mannerisms were so real I had to look her up to see if she really was born and raised in France (she was, in Paris, though her mother came from Poland). It is the troubled son who connects the two. Add a troubled marriage that Law's character has with a neurotic but striving wife (Robin Penn Wright) and their own daughter and her autistic tendencies, and you have a complicated world. And it takes a director like the also underrated Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient"), who made only eight movies before his early death, to make sense of this without pandering to sensation. And keeping it visually beautiful.There are flaws here, partly in the writing (also Minghella's hand), adding elements that seem a bit forced (the "good" prostitute, for example). And perhaps even the end, which is beautiful and idealistic and dramatic but a hair sudden after all, needed a different tilt. But in all there is psychology and sentiment and narrative twisting enough for any solid contemporary movie. It still resonates, even a decade later. So why the lack of appreciation? My first guess is that it isn't flashy, it never goes over any edge. You might say it takes no chances. But if you like a really well made drama for what it is, this is one to try.

juneebuggy This was almost a really good movie, following criminals, immigrants and well-to-do professional types in London's King's Cross neighborhood.Jude Law looks good and does a fine job as an architect staking out and tracking the thief who twice broke into his office. Along the way he hops into a bathtub and begins an affair with the 15 year old thief's mother (Juliette Binoche) -she's a Serbian refugee, trying to blackmail him into not pressing charges against her son. Robin Wright plays Law's live in girlfriend -she's meant to be Swedish but her accent is terrible and her character all over the place. I expected better from her as I'm usually a fan.The story itself never really comes together, even at the end when all the characters intersect, it wasn't fulfilling. I did enjoy seeing Sherlock's (Martin Freeman) here and also liked the Serbian boys 'jumping' all over Kings Cross while they burgled people. Good acting from "the thief" and Binoche. 02.23.14

Benjamin Cox The dangers of indulging in a little dramatic movie like this every now and again is that too often, you get burnt. But before you start, let me state that this film does have several reasons that make it stand out from the crowd. Director Anthony Minghella knows how to shoot a film, thesps like Jude Law and Juilette Binoche have both experience and reputations to draw on and people like me still get a rush of blood thinking about Underworld's work for the soundtrack to "Trainspotting". It would be a rare day indeed if this sort of pedigree were wasted in some sort of plodding, unrealistic time-waster but alas, today is that day. Despite me ignoring my first impressions and sticking with it, this is one of those films where characters mumble lines of dialogue you'd never hear in real life and very little plot development makes any sort of sense.Throwing himself into his work redeveloping the area around Kings Cross, architect Will (Law) struggles to cope at home with his half-Swedish girlfriend Liv (Robin Wright-Penn) and her semi-autistic gymnast daughter Beatrice (Poppy Rogers). After a break-in at his office, Will eventually finds the culprit - a fifteen year-old teenager from Sarejevo called Miro (Rafi Gavron) - and follows him home where he becomes enchanted by Milo's mother Amira (Binoche). As Will and Amira start seeing each other, Will begins to question his life while Amira slowly discovers what her son has been doing behind her back...Like I said, there are things to recommend about "Breaking And Entering" and for me, the acting is the first noticeable plus. Binoche, Law and Wright-Penn are excellent as are most of the supporting cast, especially Rogers and Martin Freeman as Will's partner Sandy. The only fly in the ointment is Ray Winstone's horribly stereotyped cop investigating the break-in, who always feels like he's two seconds away from rolling over his car's bonnet and driving at high speed through some cardboard boxes. Other positives are Minghella's direction which gives the film a suitably urban feel to match the seediness of Kings Cross perfectly and the soundtrack by Underworld is just brilliant, without being intrusive. The ingredients were there but the film's leisurely pace and frankly odd story undermines all that hard work. Take the fact that Will & Sandy, instead of hiring security to look after their office, decide to spend the night in their car staking the place out but end up being bothered by prostitutes. The dialogue is also pretty poor - Law's character, who seems to spend an abnormally large amount of time staring into the middle-distance, delivers lines of such cryptic complexity that I had no idea what he was on about half the time.In some ways, it reminded me of Binoche's English-speaking debut "The Unbearable Lightness Of Being" which is beautifully acted and directed but spend the entire duration going absolutely nowhere and ultimately ended up being a very pretty but dull film. "Breaking And Entering" suffers from similar problems, being far too pretentious and not nearly believable enough for me to care. In fact, Will's generally unlikeable nature put me off just as much and other than his good looks and the need to protect her son, I couldn't see what attracted Amira to him in the first place. I'm a great admirer of Binoche (in every respect) but this film doesn't really do much for her CV. "Breaking And Entering" might offer something for viewers used to dramas such as this but personally, I just wanted something to happen or quite honestly, for the film to abandon Will and follow Winstone's heavily-clichéd copper for a few hours while he cracked some heads down in the East End. Instead, the film stuck with a bunch of boring people doing not very much while I wondered how so many talented people could simultaneously have an off-day.