My Blueberry Nights

Singer Norah Jones makes her movie debut as a brokenhearted woman on a cross-country odyssey, where she meets a Manhattan cafe owner (Jude Law), a Memphis cop (David Strathairn) and his slatternly wife (Rachel Weisz) and a Nevada gambler (Natalie Portman). The script by director Wong Kar Wai and novelist Lawrence Block is an aggregation of set pieces that border on cliché (and occasionally sneak across the border), but it gives everyone a chance to shine, and Wong gives the movie his customary near-fetishistic visual lushness, vibrant with saturated colors. So, can Jones act? Perhaps; here she’s more a presence than a character, but the camera loves her to distraction, and she looks exactly the way she sounds in her music. The movie is less than the sum of its parts, but some of the parts are wonderful.