The first American film of Wong Kar-wai and the acting debut of pop singer Norah Jones proves to be an event less than momentous. The Hong Kong director has no doubt brought along a vision, confined as it largely is to café, diner, bar, and casino, dressed up with sufficient surface activity (coarse grain, incandescent color, reflected light, lettered windows, signage, slow-motion, uneven focus, and so forth) to mark him as an heir to Josef von Sternberg: the film image as jungle, a luxuriant visual field through which to wend, weave, and hack your way. So thick the imagery, so thin the story: the ten-month, cross-country odyssey of a jilted young woman, mutating en route from Elizabeth to Lizzie to Betty to Beth. (We see next to nothing of the open road, but are always within beckoning earshot of a passing train.) Jones, a figure of unintimidating comeliness, particularly as a romantic possibility for a slumming, hash-slinging Jude Law, brings little of her vocal stylings into her line delivery: no Julie London or Lena Horne is she, much less a Crosby or Sinatra. (Chan Marshall, alias Cat Power, brings a lot more into a little cameo as Law’s ex.) Even so, her feeble chirps and twitters sound pretty natural alongside the brassy white-trash accents of Rachel Weisz and Natalie Portman. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd