A cross section of New Yorkers - from a lowly cleaner to a cocksure lawyer - are linked in this intriguing web of interconnecting stories.

There's middle management lackey Alan Arkin, a deeply unfulfilled divorcee driven to unimaginable levels of spite by the constant, unforced brevity of a colleague.

Disenchanted John Turturro is an obsessively logical physics lecturer who gauges life and love with the application of the sort of equations he teaches his students.

Most memorably, Matthew McConaughey - in a role a million miles from Sahara - subtly portrays a young turk lawyer tormented by a guilty conscience after a hit'n'run.

In segments introduced with a pithy homilies such as Wisdom Comes Suddenly or Ignorance is Bliss, these disparate characters take paths that randomly impinge both directly and indirectly on one another.

For instance, McConaughey's hotshot lawyer is the driver who leaves a young cleaner with her hopes of a better life shattered and guiltily sells his BMW to Turturro's bleak intellectual.

The world director Jill Sprecher and her screenwriter sister Karen have created is one where icy intellectuals exhibit warm feelings and hardened cynics soften into idealists.

Deftly composed and displaying a wit and savvy beyond most dramas, it champions the apirations of life's malcontents and gives optimists cause to stick to their guns.

It's not that far from Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia but opts for authenticity rather than that movie's flourishes of surrealism.

If you subscribe to emotional chaos theory, then this could be a lesson well learned.

Tim Evans