It's easy to dismiss "Breaking and Entering," from writer-director Anthony Minghella ("The English Patient," "Cold Mountain"), as just another example of the filmmaker's penchant for arted-up but essentially vapid romantic melodrama.

All true, but still. "Breaking and Entering" got to me. Set in contemporary London and filmed so that the city -- and its tatty but rapidly gentrifying Kings Cross neighborhood -- is a character in itself, the film stars Jude Law as an architect whose office keeps getting ripped off. When he meets the hauntingly beautiful mother of one of the miscreants who have been stealing from him, he seduces her, a plot twist most easily explained by the fact that she is played by Juliette Binoche.

It's all too conveniently coincidental for words, but that's precisely what "Breaking and Entering" is about: words and how we use them to avoid confronting our deepest anxieties. For all its contrivances (including Vera Farmiga's improbably erudite whore), "Breaking and Entering" has its finger on the pulse of contemporary London life and possesses its share of fleeting delights, chief among them the sublime Robin Wright Penn as Law's live-in girlfriend. How ironic that the best moment of a film about language is Penn's wordless, devastating gaze in the emotionally tumultuous third act.

-- Ann Hornaday (Feb. 9, 2007)

Contains sexuality and profanity.