‘The Lost City’ is intriguing as a historical document and adequate as cinema, but it has a blandness at its core that no amount of spicy mambo and booty-quaking dance routines can disguise.
The Lost City (2006)
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Reviews Counted:82
Fresh:21
Rotten:61
Average Rating:4.7/10
Consensus: Its heart is in the right place, but what starts as a promising exercise devolves into an overlong, unevenly directed disappointment.
Theatrical Release:05-12-2008
Synopsis: The Lost City is actor/director Andy Garcia’s bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full... The Lost City is actor/director Andy Garcia’s bittersweet lyric celebration of Cuban culture that took him 16 years to make. Using music, literature and dance, City captures Havana in full tropical bloom during the late 1950s. Where Buena Vista Social Club commemorated an era of Cuban music before it slipped away, City captures the moment where performers like Beny More electrified audiences with that rhythm, a rhythm that made Havana the Pearl of the Antilles. Scripted by Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whom critic David Thomson likened to Jorge-Luis Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marques, City builds like a vivid tropical fever-dream; a love story and revolution set to music. Centered in El Tropico, a nightclub roughly modeled after Havana’s famous Tropicana, proprietor Fico Fellove tries to hold his family and club together as the dictator Batista’s reign of terror comes crashing down around him. Ultimately, to survive, Fico must leave everything he loves. City is every immigrant’s story—a paean to lost culture. It’s a time and place in history that still lives vividly in the imagination of the exile. And as conjured by Infante and Garcia, this is a land where rhythm can’t be exiled. You can leave the country, but the rhythm will never leave you. Along with its original score, City sings with 40 different songs. Mambos, chachachas, rumbas, toques, danzones, boleros. Together they create an oral history of Cuba. They are love songs to an indomitable culture—a culture that reveals itself in music, but also in dance, in poetry, in Catholicism, in African and European heritages, in Revolution, in tobacco, in Santeria and the azure sky and water that surround the island. These are the residents of The Lost City. -- © Lions Gate Films [More]
Starring: Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Inés Sastre
Starring: Andy Garcia, Dustin Hoffman, Bill Murray, Inés Sastre, Jsu Garcia
Director: Andy Garcia
Director: Andy Garcia
Screenwriter: G. Cabrera Infante
Producer: Frank Mancuso
Studio: Lions Gate Films
Reviews for The Lost City
There may be a good film here, but it struggles to break free of the cumbersome framework.
Andy Garcia’s preposterous vanity project The Lost City is an all-singing, all-dancing version of the Cuban Revolution.
The script is scrupulously even-handed, but Garcia can't seem to get a grip on this sprawl.
Great music and costumes, but with a woeful plot and jaw-droppingly stilted dialogue. Cuban-born Garcia's main complaint against Fidel seems to be that rich, corrupt Cubans could no longer dance the night away.
Andy Garcia's directorial debut is a flawed and overlong but nonetheless watchable drama with strong performances, a superb soundtrack and bizarre appearances from Dustin Hoffman and Bill Murray.
Garcia is just too earnest to make his dream project anything but deadly dull.
It's by no means a flawless film, but it's a meaty one, and if you're a big fan of Andy Garcia, I'd definitely recommend it. (Plus, Bill Murray's in there.)
When it succeeds, the film conveys a bittersweet longing for a lost moment and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic Cuba.
...plays like a confusing and inferior Caribbean analog to The Godfather, without anything like the narrative drive of Coppola's film.
While the soundtrack of Cuban dance music is superb, this historical drama is leaden and simply too long-winded for its own good.
Shapeless stories that drift away from the revolution, puffed up by a biased take on 1959 Cuba with the hot air of romance.
Garcia's storytelling lacks highs and lows and has far too much going on. And on.
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