C-

As with the earlier Paris installment of the urban-specific series, the omnibus movie “New York, I Love You” is a mixed bag, but in this case the scales fall on the negative side. This love letter to the Big Apple has more than its share of worms, and it certainly doesn’t convey much sense of the special quality of the city (as the Paris picture did).

Apparently the sole holdover from the Paris film is Natalie Portman, who starred in one of the vignettes in the first picture and here not only acts again (in the segment directed by Mira Nair, a nice dialogue in which she plays an about-to-be-married Jewish woman conversing with a diamond merchant played by Irrfan Khan) but also wrote and directed another (a trite piece about a male nanny played by Carlos Acosta). The remaining directors and actors are newcomers, and their contributions mostly fall into a fairly nondescript middle ground.

These include Kiang Wen’s opening piece featuring Hayden Christensen as a pickpocket, Andy Garcia as an older, more experienced thief, and Rachel Bilson as the woman both have eyes for; Shunji Iwai’s take on a musician trying to meet a deadline (Orlando Bloom) and the woman who encourages him (Christina Ricci); Yvan Attal’s doublet about two couples (Maggie Q and Ethan Hawke, and Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn), which at least has a nice twist; and Fatih Akin’s exercise about a painter (Ugur Yucel) and the woman he wants to be his model (Shu Qi).

The better pieces include Joshua Marston’s two-hander, which has Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman as a bickering couple taking a slow stroll down to Coney Island, and Brett Ratner’s straightforwardly sitcom-like segment about a drippy high school student (Anton Yelchin) who’s persuaded by a loudmouth druggist (James Caan) to take his daughter (Olivia Thirlby) to the prom.

But about midway, things are brought to a fatal halt by the two weakest entries. The first is Allen Hughes’s thin vignette about a woman (Drea De Matteo) puzzling over her interest in a bland man (the unutterably vacuous Bradley Cooper). But it seems like heaven beside the second, an enigmatic piece of phony poetry in which Julie Christie plays an over-the-hill, angst-ridden opera diva welcomed to an otherworldly hotel by a wrinkled clerk (John Hurt) and a limping bellboy (Shia LaBeouf, sporting an atrocious accent). It was written by the late Anthony Minghella, and if he’d lived to direct it, he either might have found some way to give it life or, more wisely, would have jettisoned it. As it is, the piece isn’t much of a tribute to Minghella, to whom the overall picture is also dedicated.

There are a few instances in which characters migrate from one episode to another, along with some transitional material by Randy Balsmeyer involving a taxi in which various characters briefly ride, but neither adds much to the mix.

Throughout the film is technically mediocre, the collection of cinematographers content mostly to shoot plainly, and as a result the city looks much less photogenic—and less interesting—than one might have expected of a cinematic love-letter.

The report is that the “I Love You” concept is intended to be expanded to other cities in a sort of world-wide display of cinematic affection for all the inspiring places on the globe. If this installment is any indication, the planned tour might well be aborted. But if not, wake me when they get to Boise.