Natalie Portman, Chris Cooper, Ethan Hawke, Bradley Cooper, Irrfan Khan, Orlando Bloom, Shia LaBeouf, James Caan, Andy Garcia

This is the second title in the ‘Cities of Love’ series. Two years earlier it was Paris, and NY was followed by Rio and Berlin.

A modest 90 min conceived in 11 short independent life stories/moments, with more than that number of famous faces of Hollywood appearing during the film (all shortly though).

Same is the number of directors, since everyone has worked on their part of the film and with their group of actors. That’s probably why we’ve been deprived of some deeper connection to the characters. That’s why certain parts of the film are more interesting than others, which seems pointless (and unnecessarily).

… such as, for example, a painter who invites an unknown young saleswoman to pose for him, and then only on scene later he is dead.

Or a former opera diva, for example, in the hotel room, which we’re looking at in conversation with a young man from the servants. But from the very next scene in which instead of a young man stands the older saver, we realize she’s imagining it all.

The average draws out a few exquisite scenes that are designed to simply draw a smile, even though they only last a few minutes.

The most striking (to me) was E.Hawke’s monologue, which, with a very imaginative story, tries to get the girl he met outside the café to bed, who, after his entire five-minute performance, reveals to him that she’s a prostitute 😁.

Or, for example, when C.Cooper as an accidental customer in a Chinese dry cleaner speaks fluent Cantonese (Chinese) language, to the surprise of those present.

What is left out of the concept (but often is the case in the titles of this type) – all these unrelated fates and characters that we follow during the action, eventually cross paths and get some common sense and connection.

Here, the only connection is derived from the character of a girl, who wanders around the city as a hobby and shoots on camera. At the very end, she publishes these brief moments in people’s lives, as a reference to only 10 different examples of love couples in a megalopolis such as NY.