1. JimB

   10

   The film is a truly a magnificent work of art. I've read dozens of comments and they all seem to drag down the film as 'a good try' or a flop; but they compare the film which you just can't do to this film. It stands alone and is art and good film art. The film is actually very deep and very meaningful. Cigarette addiction is like a demon inside you it can tear you in half trying to rid yourself of the addiction that… Collapse

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2. RachelH.

   10

   AWESOME hysterically funny star casted movie. Bound to be a cult classic. Christopher Walker..YES YES YES!!!! Susan Surandan double yes. Mary Louise Parker...hysterical...Mandy Moore..who knew she was so good? And Kate Winslet steels the show totally AMAZING in this role..she blows us all away. Full of camp.nostalgia....over the top hilarity..a kind of absurd and demented west side story back drop...full of delicious archetypes and yummy stereotypes all in humor and wit. We LOVE IT!!!… Expand

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3. ChadS.

   7

   Two separate but intertwined dialectics propel the narrative in "Romance and Cigarettes", a gently provocative neo-musical that makes us aware of our over-reliance on other people's words and music to express love and love-related matters. The first dialectic vies poetry against the hegemony of popular song, whose dominancy can be traced to poetry's transformation to free-verse during the mid-twentieth century. A lot of people think they know poetry; that a poem is supposed to rhyme, people like Nick(James Gandolfini) and Kitty(the ageless and exquisite Susan Sarandon), who unleash their vulgar couplets of doggerel at each other, when the wife discovers that her husband had been unfaithful. The second dialectic vies popular music against "alternative" music. Engelbert Humperdinck's "A Man Without Love"(a Top-five hit from 1968) plays in Nick's head as he dreams of Tula(Kate Winslet), his mistress. A commercial song is like a greeting card; the sentiment may hail from one's heart, but it's a commodified heart; love as nurture(in the musical number, we see other people using the song as a means to an end), rather than nature(a genuine feeling for another person as expressed in terms of the song's originality and relative obscurity). Alternative music is a commodity, too; make no mistake of this, but Ute Lemper's "Little Water Song" feels more personal, more organic than the Humperdinck smash, which the film illustrates by isolating Tula underwater without any human interference. "Romance and Cigarettes" exquisitely shows us how Tula's love is deeper than Nick's. Although poetry will never again surpass popular song in the hearts and minds of the hoi polloi, Nick gives "The Girl That I Marry" some gravitas by reading Irving Berlin's lyrics as if it WERE poetry, before Kitty accompanies her husband in a cappella style, the song, now personalized by oral recitation, seems more like a sung poem than a commercialized song(the rendering of musical notation is what makes the song a popular art). "Romance and Cigarettes" has a lot to say about how people express love. We don't know how, according to the filmmaker, so we let anybody from George Gershwin("Follow my lead, oh, how I need/ someone to watch over me") to Iggy Pop("I hear her heart beating, loud as thunder/saw the stars crashing) to do it for us.… Expand

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4. Ethan

   3

   Although this movie features music, it is not necessarily a musical per se. Modern musical... maybe but its not played out to be a classic musical. First of all, when I first saw the cast list, I thought this movie was going to be amazing. Even if Turturro had to raise most of the money himself after not getting picked up for several years I still thought it would be great. However, I was unpleasantly surprised as I watched this horrible pretentious film. Although there were star performances, especially from Kate Winslet. The spectacular acting was not enough to take away from the corniness and convolution of the film. I'm not being naive in criticizing the presence of the music, I'm just saying that I think the movie would have been better if it was purely acting and lacking of the artsy portrayal through the music. A stellar cast and a horrible screenplay... this movie was too good to be true.… Expand

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