Who'd have thought that in the year of "Across the Universe" there would come a musical that was even stranger? Yet here
is "Romance & Cigarettes," a potty-mouthed Brooklyn love story about a man named Nick Murder and his lovers and friends, all of whom sometimes burst into song -- not original songs, but familiar recordings by artists as diverse as Engelbert Humperdinck, Tom Jones, and Elvis Presley. This is technically a 2005 picture that got stuck in the wheels of a studio merger, with neither party entirely sure who actually had the rights to it. At last the film's writer and director, John Turturro, stepped in and said, "The heck with both of you, I'll distribute it myself." This seemed to satisfy everyone, and now "Romance & Cigarettes" is finally in theaters, delighting, offending, and bemusing audiences wherever it goes. It's set in a blue-collar neighborhood in an undetermined time period, sort of the present but sort of the '50s, too. Nick Murder (James Gandolfini) is a construction worker whose wife, Kitty (Susan Sarandon), has just discovered his affair with Tula (Kate Winslet). Kitty is faithful and fiery, the sort of wife any man would be glad to have -- but Tula is a little younger, a redhead, and a randy British vixen to boot.
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