My Blueberry Nights is the latest effort by the writer-director of In The Mood For Love. Don't get excited: that was sublime, this is rubbish. The central - though blank and colourless - character here is a New Yorker called Elizabeth, played by the singer Norah Jones. Elizabeth's heart is broken by her two-timing boyfriend, but she has a platonic new friend in the form of expatriate English cafe owner Jeremy (Jude Law). Jeremy is cloyingly nice, supposedly empathetic, and supplies the film's extended titular metaphor with his explanation for why no-one ever eats his blueberry pie: "There's nothing wrong with the blueberry pie. It's just people make other choices." Similar greeting-card homilies abound.

Elizabeth heads west across America, for no other apparent purpose than to "find herself". En route, she encounters a succession of equally charmless and self obsessed people, especially after she finds work as a waitress and barmaid in Memphis. Her new friends include a deeply depressed cop called Arnie (David Strathairn), whose marriage is on the rocks. Strathairn's acting is okay, but it's in the service of an implausible script. The funny thing is that the themes and settings here are the stuff that great Tennessee Williams plays - or great Tom Waits songs - are made of; but the treatment is hackneyed beyond belief.

There's a glimmer of potential when Elizabeth's path crosses that of desperate gambler Leslie (Natalie Portman), but even that subplot descends into bathos. All the while, Elizabeth sends diaristic postcards back to good old Jeremy in New York City and.we'll let you guess the rest. Saccharine, cliched, groaningly predictable and - in short - utterly abysmal.