Moving with languour of someone far too brainy to be in a hurry for
anything, offering mordant gibes in that sotto voce growl and
punctuating them with an ever-present cigarette, her Dorothy {Parker}
makes an active verb of the word sophistication.

That arabesquing cigarette of Dorothy's is instructive. A lot of Ms.
Leigh's characters smoke. She makes a Parkeresque remark about how she
chose roles in the days when she was herself a smoker: "If the character
smoked, I'd immediately think it was a pretty good script." But each of
her smokers smokes in a distinct way. Tralala, the platinum blond hooker
in "Last Exit {to Brooklyn}," knows that she can walk into a waterfront
bar and have a man at her side by the count of 10; for her the cigarette
is an instrument of seduction. In Ulu Grosbard's 1995 film "Georgia,"
about the self-destructive, untalented sister of a pop star, Ms. Leigh's
Sadie draws on her cigarettes with the same desperate craving she
exhibits for drugs and alcohol.
-NY Times, Arts & Leisure Section, Sun., Jun. 2, '02