Diced Apple: "New York, I Love You"

A couple of years back, we had the starry yet uneven portmanteau Paris, Je T'Aime; now we have New York, I Love You, a Manhattan transfer - following in the footsteps of the similar New York Stories and the Demme-produced cable movie Subway Stories - which proves even more of a mixed bag. Hidden in the end credits is the promise Shanghai will provide the next destination for this series, and you can well imagine London being ticked off soon enough, every other short a source of gritty, grey-skied social realism or cheeky Danny Dyerisms.

Any portmanteau that offers up Bradley Cooper, Hayden Christensen and Orlando Bloom within its opening twenty minutes can't be said to start wholly auspiciously: Cooper is glimpsed but briefly in a framing back-of-the-cab encounter (you might say he's well cast as an unwanted intruder), but Christensen is woodenly prominent as a hustler going through some sub-Mamet business in a bar with Andy Garcia and Rachel Bilson, and Bloom's a scruffy twerp parsing Dostoyevsky to woo Christina Ricci.

There are likable actors here too, mind. Mira Nair, edging her way back to some feeling after the inert Amelia, gives us Irfan Khan as a Gujarati diamond merchant and Natalie Portman as a Hasidic Jew crossing paths on the eve of the latter's wedding, and Ethan Hawke just about wins us over with an initially creepy pick-up routine that goes to waste on a passing Maggie Q. Already, though, we're getting a sense of the project's limitations: that these are at best anecdotes, throwaway gags told by directors trying to impress us with starry casting and twists-in-the-tail.

Take Brett Ratner's surprisingly sweet prom-night reminiscence, in which young Anton Yelchin takes overbearing pharmacist James Caan's wheelchair-bound daughter Olivia Thirlby for a spin, or Portman's low-key directorial outing about a presumed male nanny (dancer Carlos Acosta) accompanying his young charge on an afternoon's stroll through Central Park. Be warned, it gets wanky: Cooper reappears to mull over a one night stand with Drea DeMatteo; "I felt I was in a Bertolucci movie," he declaims, but has to settle for one of the Hughes brothers on distracted form.

Prize for bathetic rumness, however, goes to the collaboration between Shekhar Kapur and Anthony Minghella, a ménage-à-quatre between Julie Christie, John Hurt, some billowing curtains and Shia LaBeouf as a hobbling, haemophiliac Slavic bellboy, at the end of which Transformers 3 begins to look not such a bad idea after all. You intuit that while the producers have had their pick of those actors willing to stick around for a few days in Manhattan, the great New York directors (Allen, Lee, Scorsese; from the indie sector, Jarmusch, Hartley, Peter Sollett) have long since moved on, their own shorts standalone items.

This here's a committee-approved reserve squad, and all the best material has been placed upfront in the first hour. (Belatedly, Yvan Attal offers us a classy, perfectly self-contained encounter between Chris Cooper and Robin Wright-Penn as lived-in strangers seeking a second chance at happiness, yet even this turns out to be something of a narrative tease.) Not entirely satisfying as a night out, then, but with its flickers of leftfield charm and spots of ethnic colour, aggravation and pretension, it is, in its own way, very New York.

New York, I Love You opens in selected cinemas from Friday.