ridiculous rating

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

These are approximately a dozen stories taking place in NYC. Some of them are interconnected. There are some good, some bad and some indifferent.1. Hayden Christensen is a thief flirting with Rachel Bilson. That's a scary acting duo. The arrival of Andy García does not necessarily save it.2. Natalie Portman is a religious Jewish buyer who is about to get married and Irrfan Khan is an Indian seller. This is an unusual and fascinating pairing. These are the interesting stuff that makes this movie worthwhile.3. Orlando Bloom is a composer talking to lovely Christina Ricci on the phone who is urging him to finish his work. This is one of those indifferent ones. Exactly how interesting is somebody talking on the phone? 4. Ethan Hawke flirts with Maggie Q after lighting her cigarette. She turns out to be a prostitute. OMG. Ethan Hawke is doing 'Before Sunrise' except a bit edgier and sexually provocative.5. After Anton Yelchin got stood up for prom by Blake Lively, James Caan sets him up with his daughter Olivia Thirlby except she's in a wheelchair. They end up having sex. This is a good one with a fun ending.6. Bradley Cooper and Drea de Matteo are meeting up for a date and we hear their interior monologues. This idea is more interesting on the pages than on the screen.7. Gimpy Shia LaBeouf helps Julie Christie settle into her hotel room. Shia's father John Hurt works at the front desk. It's a bit too desperate to be artistic.8. Carlos Acosta is caring for little girl Taylor Geare as he brings her to Jacinda Barrett. People assume he's a manny. I like the locations but the unknown relationship isn't as interesting as writer/director Natalie Portman hopes. After all, Jeff Goldblum had a black kid when he faced dinosaurs.9. Painter Ugur Yücel buys from herbalist Shu Qi. He asks her out but dies before the date.10. Robin Wright Penn starts talking to stranger Chris Cooper on the street while having a smoke but are they strangers? This could be more but they don't even fully use the time that they're given.11. Eva Amurri is arguing with boyfriend Justin Bartha and he decides to spontaneously buy a trip to Rome.12. Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman are an elderly couple. Two veterans doing aimless conversations while on a very long walk.Emilie Ohana is a video artist who pops up from time to time.

I liked this about as much as Paris, Je T'aime, which is to say not so much. The attraction of course is the all-star cast involved, its a regular omnibus of talent in a series of ten artsy, disjointed short stories about love and relationships in New York.It's a mixed bag; some good, some boring, some make you think and some are just plain bizarre but none of them are really long enough to matter. This collection didn't leave its mark on me and if there was a bigger message meant to be conveyed, I didn't get it. Mostly it was a waste of time. I guess a couple stories did stand out; Natalie Portman as a Hasidic Jew fantasizing about her East Indian diamond broker, Anton Yelchin's prom date story was good, weird, silly. Um yeah, a big waste of talent. 7/15/14

There really is so many things wrong with this film i don't even know where to start. Lets deal with the main problem, the plot. 10 short stories, 10 'romantic tales' set around the city of New York City portrayed by young, bright talented actors. Problem being that not only has every single actor seem to be given a role that doesn't really suit them (Orlando Bloom is a loner and a struggling writer, Hayden Christiansen as a Con Man.... Really???), their stories are so short and inconsequential that you really don't care about any of them.If you have seen films like Valentines Day, New Years Eve, and the classic that is Love Actually, then you know exactly what this film needs to make it successful. It needs a central role. It needs a person or two people that you care what happens to them, i.e Hugh Grant and Martine in Love Actually, or Ashton and Jennifer in Valentines Day. This film doesn't have that at all. Not only does it not have that, it doesn't even really have any characters that are remotely likable.This film bombed in the first few weeks of its release, and it really deserved to. The writers/directors seemed to be so obsessed with getting all these stories in and fitting them into New York somehow, they forgot to include character and story progression, two of the most important factors when creating a film.In my 24 years (very soon to be 25) here on this earth there have only ever been 3 films that i have watched and hated the fact that i had just wasted my life watching them. Donnie Darko, Machete, and now this load of rubbish.Please do not watch this. If you want to watch a film like this, then please watch the 3 i have mentioned above, or 'He's just not that into you' which is another very decent film. How this has managed to get an average of 6.4 i have no idea. Maybe just the people who love Bradley Cooper voting highly because he is in it? can't see any other reason at all to be honest. Absolutely Terrible.

The producers of "Paris, je t'aime" bring us "New York, I Love You", another collection of short films ostensibly revolving around a city, in this case New York. The film was marketed as a ode to romance, love and the Big Apple. In reality it says little about either love or New York city. What it instead seems to conjure up is the world of early film noir. Jules Dassin's "The Naked City", which ended with he line "there are eight million stories in the Naked City", seems to be the unconscious springboard, "New York, I Love You" treating us to a kind of romanticised, cutesy fetishizing of alienation, lonely hearts and fickle human collection amidst a cold, impersonal, urban backdrop. And so the film is best when it's contrasting the yearnings of New Yorkans with a more existential ambivalence. Humans yearn, the city doesn't care. And as love and fantasy depend on a certain amount of anonymity – you as spectator write or project your yearnings upon an object – the vignette-heavy style of "New York, I Love You", which doesn't allow us to learn much about its characters, itself exploits a kind of romantic anonymity.While most anthology films suffer from conflicting moods and styles, "New York, I Love You" has some semblance of unity. It differs from its predecessor in that its short films, each by a different director and each revolving around a different set of characters, are loosely tied together rather than exist separately. The result is a kind of Robert Altman styled portmanteau or mosaic, the stories smoothly overlapping and bleeding into one another. Like Altman's films, the impression is that of a wandering camera or disembodied narrator teasing out different characters and eavesdropping on bits of plot. It's also one of the few New York films to portray the city as being heavily class divided, multi ethnic and inhabited by a rainbow of age groups.If "New York, I Love You" works well as a whole, its actual individual short stories are a mixed bag. Shekhar Kapur serves up the nice tale of a bellhop and a retired opera singer, Joshua Marston gives us a glimpse at a bickering old couple (Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman) and several other vignettes give us snippets of SoHo, and various interesting Chinese, Indian and Jewish locals. Many of the other films, however, are either overly cutesy or pretentious.8/10 - Worth one viewing.