Anthony Minghella's Breaking and Entering deals with crime, ethnic strife and infidelity, subjects that usually produce the kind of explosive dramas that club us to the ground. We suffer for our own good. Think Crash.

Rather than pursue the expected course, Minghella lowers his voice to examine urban and personal conflict in a movie that ultimately asserts - albeit in mature fashion - a belief in bedrock human decency.

By the end of Breaking and Entering, which is set in London's evolving King's Cross neighborhood, common sense has settled over the proceedings. If Breaking and Entering has something to say, it's just this: We may not all be able to get along, but we needn't constantly go for the jugular, either.

Of course, the path to any form of reconciliation can't be easy. In a city as teeming as London, conflict never seems more than a footstep away. Immigrants and longtime residents clash in neighborhoods that are changing faster than people's ability to accommodate all the social turbulence.

Breaking and Entering, the first movie Minghella has made from a script he wrote since 1991's Truly, Madly, Deeply, can seem more like a thoroughly researched novel than a blazing page-turner, but it deals with a subject that has enough juice to keep the movie percolating.

Jude Law, who worked with Minghella on Cold Mountain, reunites with the director to play Will Francis, a successful landscape architect. At the beginning of the movie, Will and his partner (Martin Freeman) open a spiffy new office in King's Cross.

Through a series of burglaries, the plot contrives to bring Will into contact with the Bosnian refugee mother (Juliette Binoche) of one of the burglars. Because his laptop is stolen, Will feels as if his life has been taken away. It's a life he's increasingly less confident about.

A sexual relationship develops between Will and Binoche's Amira partly because Will's domestic life has become difficult. He shares a severely modern townhome with Liv (Robin Wright Penn) and her daughter (Poppy Rogers), who appears to be mildly autistic. Separated from her home country and experiencing some sort of perpetual dislocation, Penn's Liv wraps herself in unhappiness.

Law's acting often has been criticized, sometimes by me. Here he does decent enough work, imbuing Will with a searching, yuppie-in- crisis quality. He doesn't quite know what to make of things, confused by the world in which he finds himself.

Binoche brings both warmth and wariness to the role of a woman who misses her homeland, and the great Ray Winstone has a wonderful small turn as an intelligent London cop. Vera Farmiga does amusing work as an eastern European prostitute who plies her trade in the area around Will's new offices. Keep an eye on Farmiga, who played a psychologist in The Departed. She's ripe for a breakthrough.

Breaking and Entering offers a kinder, gentler version of London's strife than we're accustomed to seeing. Not all parts of the script are equally well-developed, and sometimes it seems as if we're looking at drama under glass. Fortunately, Minghella's an intelligent enough writer to observe through this kind of lens and almost get away with it.