REVIEWED - ROMANCE & CIGARETTES: JOHN Turturro hasdemonstrated his flair and range as an actor time and again, most often in films directed by Spike Lee or Joel and Ethan Coen. The latter are credited as executive producers on Romance & Cigarettes, Turturro's third feature as writer-director after the promising but over-praised Mac (1992) and the dire, self-consciously theatrical Illuminata (1998).

It is ironic that an actor as capable as Turturro should assemble such a formidable team of fellow thespians to utterly pointless effect in Romance & Cigarettes. Set in the Queens borough of New York, its threadbare storyline chronicles strains in a working-class marriage between archly named stereotypes. Feisty Kitty Kane (Susan Sarandon, who is rarely ever less than fiesty) learns that her husband, construction worker Nick Murder (a somnambulant James Gandolfini) has a secret lover, Tula (Kate Winslet, spouting expletives with the gusto of a teen who has heard them for the first time).

For reasons best known to himself, Turturro gets all the key characters to burst into song and dance whenever the narrative flags, which is very often indeed, and they mime or sing along with back catalogue material from Tom Jones, Engelbert Humperdinck, Bruce Springsteen, Janis Joplin, Connie Francis and James Brown.

Perhaps Turturro imagined that he might emulate Dennis Potter's imaginative employment of a similar device in Pennies from Heaven, but the result is much closer to Lars von Trier's risible venture into musicals with Dancer in the Dark. A shrill and shapeless karaoke melodrama, Romance & Cigarettes is so wildly self-indulgent and stridently overacted that it is cringe-inducing and ultimately embarrassing to behold.