In theaters

BREAKING AND ENTERING, written and directed by Anthony Minghella, 132 minutes, rated R.

The new Anthony Minghella movie, “Breaking and Entering,” follows one unhappily married man seeking to reclaim passion in his life and one emotionally damaged woman who acquiesces to his advances, though she knows she shouldn’t.

How they come together is as contrived as it is passionless.

From Minghella’s own script, “Breaking and Entering” could have been titled “Glum Rooms with Long Faces,” particularly thanks to a weirdly expressionless performance by Robin Wright Penn, whose character looks and behaves as if they just wheeled her out of the morgue. Watching her here, one longs to check her toes for a tag, but I digress.

The film stars Jude Law as Will Francis, a London-based landscape architect who lives in a posh Kensington pad with longtime girlfriend Liv (Penn), a Swedish-American who used to make documentaries back when she was happy.

Also living with them is Liv’s 13-year-old daughter, Bea (Poppy Rogers), whose struggle with autism consumes much of Liv’s life. The rest of Liv’s time is spent either with her face dipped into a light box (it lessens her depression) or arguing with Will, with whom she has lost touch.

Each is aware of the growing chasm between them, but neither is particularly moved into action to fix it. They’re rich, they’re dull, they’re restless – and you sense there’s a small part of them that rather likes it that way.

At work, Will has other problems. After relocating his architectural firm to London’s sketchy King’s Cross section, which is in flux because of urban renewal, he is the victim of two burglaries, which the police have not solved.

Taking matters into his own hands, he stakes out the property and – after a few amusing interludes with a pushy prostitute (Vera Farmiga) – he finds his thief in Miro (Rafi Gavron), the acrobatic son of Bosnian refugee Amira (Juliette Binoche). Instead of busting Miro, Will naturally takes a shine to his mother. A smoldering affair ignites between them, complications ensue.

The trouble is the complications aren’t very interesting, though the relationship between Amira and Miro is. Here is the story on which Minghella should have focused – the dynamics between a single, working-class mother who fled her country during the Bosnian war and how she’s on the cusp of losing her son to the streets of London, which, mirroring her family, is in a state of transition.

We get moments of that story here, but suffocating it are Will, Liv and Bea, who are protected by privilege and thus never really at the same level of risk as Amira and Miro. Minghella’s aim is to have us pull for all of them, which is difficult to do when you don’t like three of them. Since his movie also is about mending class differences, he manufactures a hopeful ending that wants to have it all – just as he wants his London to have it all – but which instead only rings false.

Grade: C-

On Blu-ray

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, directed by Jonathan Demme, written by Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris, based on the novel by Richard Condon, 130 minutes, rated R.

Jonathan Demme’s “The Manchurian Candidate,” a remake of John Frankenheimer’s jittery, 1962 cold-war classic about political brainwashing, arrives on high-definition Blu-ray disc to slay the political process as well as corporate America, with Big Business viewed here as the real threat to our country, much in the same way that the communists were feared in the original film.

The movie works on several levels. Daniel Pyne and Dean Georgaris’ script deftly updates the proceedings to the near future, the roles are complex and meaty, and the performances by Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep and Liev Schreiber are superb. The film errs in that moments drag beneath the weight of its running time, but its ideas and its fears are steeped in enough legitimate worry to be compelling, with the payoff leading to a strong finish of note.

Swapping out the original film’s backdrop of the Korean War for the Gulf War, the film follows Gulf War veteran Maj. Bennett Marco (Washington), who discovers that during the war, he and other members of his platoon were implanted with computer chips in their brains that have brainwashed them into remembering events that never took place.

Of chief concern to Marco is Raymond Shaw (Schreiber), the tall, good-looking Army sergeant who won the Medal of Honor for an act of heroism Marco believes never occurred. Now a vice presidential candidate backed by his vicious, powerful mother, Sen. Eleanor Prentiss Shaw (Streep), Raymond is on a manufactured path to greatness. As ever, Washington is so good, you almost take him for granted. Same goes for Streep, whose evil, ice-crunching senator is a fine nod to Angela Lansbury’s bristling turn in the first film. While the movie doesn’t match the raw, satirical power of the original, Demme’s “Candidate” scores for being so prescient and relevant. Its messages of “securing tomorrow today” and the “need to look inward to tend to our own base” remain eerily timely.

Grade: B+