Anthony Minghella hasn't written his own script since Truly, Madly, Deeply, his directing debut. His latest film seems as personal as that first, now cherished and mocked in equal measure.

This one will be too, because of the characters who inhabit its London - they are characters whom some will recognise readily while others will dismiss them as figures fashioned merely to illustrate some of our present discontents.

Jude Law plays Will, who runs a smart landscape architects firm working in the new King's Cross development and is encased in a failing partnership with his Swedish girlfriend (Robin Penn Wright) and her troubled daughter (Poppy Roger).

His life is further disturbed by a series of burglaries, one of which spirits away his personal computer on which a great deal of his life is laid out.

Furious, he lies in wait for the culprits and chases one of the gang (Rafi Gavron) back to his home; there he discovers the computer and finds himself falling for the young thief 's mother (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian refugee and widow. She sets out to blackmail him to protect her son.

Minghella lays out all this with his usual style, and adds to it Will's encounter with a local prostitute (Vera Farmiga) and his business partnership with Sandy (Martin Freeman), who fancies one of the cleaners at his lush office.

What's lacking is the dramatic flair that illuminated Truly, Madly Deeply. It may have something to do with Law's acting: he's perfectly accomplished in the role but can't seem to find the emotional depths evinced so marvellously by Juliet Stevenson in Minghella's first film.

Perhaps it is also because Minghella himself is so anxious to pinpoint the different levels in his story that he has somehow constrained himself. In avoiding much of a dramatic edge, he has made Breaking and Entering much too cool and schematic.

Only the episodes involving the prostitute, who wants payment for talk if her customer isn't going to relieve his urges any other way, hint at what this film might have been with a more untidy, turbulent centre.

This is a London stamped with a middle-class liberal's view of what is going on. But it needs a bit of working-class bounce to achieve a shrewd enough look at how and where we are now.