Film.com: The movie kicks off with a series of recreated news stories in which bizarre coincidences of timing and place resulted in even more bizarre deaths. It's a meditation on "chance" and its impact on our daily lives. From there, we're dropped into the midst of a humorous police search that introduces us to both a hapless police officer and a young inner-city kid who functions, briefly, as a kind of oracle. We're then quickly spun through a cast that includes a crusty old man who's dying of cancer, his male nurse and ditzily distraught wife; a child prodigy and his exploitive, manipulative father; a misogynistic guru who tutors men on how to take advantage of women; an aged host of a kiddie television show and his estranged, druggie daughter; and a washed up TV whiz kid who's broke and lonely. As their separate tales unwind, so do their ties to one another. What Anderson really does, though, is take the sad, bittersweet notes that they all sound in their individual lives and orchestrate them into a moving commentary on the nature of human interaction, on how much casual brutality and violence is folded into everyday existence. He does this, though, without sentimentality or cheap tugs at the tear-ducts. He does it through a deft mixture of humor and unflinching characterizations. Review written by: Ernest Hardy