Stealing beauty; In Breaking and Entering, a thief introduces passion into one man's sheltered London life, while the hunt is on for a jewel in Blood Diamond.(Movie review)

London is now celebrated as the capital of swinging Europe, a bohemian boomtown where the mobile phones never stop cheeping and taxis are full at midnight. But there is, of course, more to the city than trendy bars and design museums. It's this other, less ebullient London that rears its head in Breaking and Entering, Anthony Minghella's elegantly brainy new film about what happens when someone shatters the invisible walls separating us from the kind of people we normally never meet.

Jude Law stars as Will Francis, a workaholic architect busy turning the dilapidated King's Cross neighborhood into a fashionable public space. While Will's career is hot, his private life has cooled into a rote relationship with his longtime partner Liv (Robin Wright Penn), whose autistic-

seeming daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), demands constant attention. The family's hopelessly stuck-until a young thief named Miro (Rafi Gavron) breaks into Will's sleek new offices. Obsessed with the robbery, Will tracks Miro down to the public-housing flat that he shares with his mother, Amira (Juliette Binoche), a Bosnian widow who works as a seamstress. Enthralled by Amira's delicate melancholy, Will finds himself entering

her life, just as Miro broke into his own.

Writer-director Minghella started out writing plays, and he has a playwright's bad habit of tying things up neatly-his metaphors click too perfectly into place. But over the years, he's turned himself into a polished director of such big-budget historical epics as The English Patient and Cold Mountain. Marking his return to London, Breaking and Entering is more modest and personal, an intimate mood piece well attuned

to the cocooned lives of well-off Londoners. Minghella knows these people inside out-how they dress, decorate their flats, and hide their feelings beneath well-turned phrases. He's particularly astute about the conflicting emotions driving his hero. Even as Will displays an architect's rage for order (a fox in the garden disturbs him inordinately), he will leap recklessly into the arms of Amira, a woman suffused with the passionate soulfulness missing from his daily life.

While Wright Penn is painfully convincing as Liv, a bottled-up woman who forces Will to guess at her unspoken resentments, Binoche makes us feel the tremulous passions of a lonely emigre suddenly stunned at being treated as an object of desire-it's her finest performance in years. Naturally, both women are drawn to Will, who, as played by the hardworking Law, is almost the personification of today's chic London. He's smart, seductively attractive, and emotionally opaque-you're never quite sure how to read that ravishing face. Happily for Liv and Amira, Will is not wicked, only lost. ...