Romance & Cigarettes

Turturro's attempt to mix working-class magical realism and MGM romanticism is wildly uneven.

Romance & Cigarettes wears thin, like a moral for the titular addiction: Sure, there's the sweet dream of that first drag, but a whole pack'll do a body bad.

It shouldn't work, but there's something beautiful in Turturro's non-judgmental, almost affectionate, exposure of human love as the courting dance of clueless primates

No musical in the past 10 years (with the exception of Chicago) has had the courage of its convictions, and that's the whole problem.

In a season seasoned with off-beat originality in the movies, from Lars and the Real Girl to I'm Not There, you still have not seen anything quite like John Turturro's extraordinary Romance and Cigarettes.

How weird is John Turturro's Romance & Cigarettes? Almost indescribably weird, though also strangely involving.

When it succeeds, it soars with great abandon, and when it fails, it fails so grandly that we still want to applaud it. This is a madhouse of a movie.

The film has an overall tonal inconsistency and suffers from the occasional bout of tin-ear-itis, which ultimately derails this sometimes interesting attempt at reinvigorating the genre.