I saw this film on TV and was immediately taken by it. The premise of a decent but flawed man (James Gandolfini), drawn by his mid-life crisis hormones away from his wife (Ms Sarandon) into the irresistible red-hot and rude clutches of a sex-shop sales assistant (Ms Winslet) from whence he heads inevitably to a tragic end, is nothing short of Greek. The cast is magnificent without exception and John Turturro'a direction highly confident. I suspected that this was a (lost) work by that greatest genius of television writing, Dennis Potter, that had (contrary to all previous attempts) been successfully adapted for the big screen. The surprise was that this was nothing to do with Potter and that Mr Turturro had penned the piece himself, proving me very wrong but in no way disappointed at the end result.
Review of Romance & Cigarettes
