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Movies / On DVD / The Lost City
The Lost City

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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.

Rated: 15

Runtime: 2 hrs 23 mins

Genre: Dramas

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

[See More Credits]

Reviews for The Lost City

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1 - 20 (sorted by critic A-Z; UK critics are listed first)
Text View | 1 2 3 4 5 >> >|
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Andy Garcia’s preposterous vanity project The Lost City is an all-singing, all-dancing version of the Cuban Revolution.

Full Review Source: Times [UK] | comment Comment
12/05/08
James Christopher
James Christopher
Times [UK]
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

The script is scrupulously even-handed, but Garcia can't seem to get a grip on this sprawl.

Full Review Source: Guardian [UK] | comment Comment
12/05/08
Cath Clarke
Cath Clarke
Guardian [UK]
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Not an embarrassment, but definitely a missed opportunity.

Full Review Source: Sky Movies | comment Comment
12/05/08
Rob Daniel
Rob Daniel
Sky Movies

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.

Full Review Source: Daily Telegraph | comment Comment
12/05/08
David Gritten
David Gritten
Daily Telegraph
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

‘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.

Full Review Source: Time Out | comment Comment
12/05/08
Tom Huddlestone
Tom Huddlestone
Time Out
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

There may be a good film here, but it struggles to break free of the cumbersome framework.

Full Review Source: Channel 4 Film | comment Comment
12/05/08
Stella Papamichael
Stella Papamichael
Channel 4 Film
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

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.

Full Review Source: ViewLondon | comment Comment
12/04/08
Matthew Turner
Matthew Turner
ViewLondon

Overdirected, yes, but it's an epic, passionate portrayal.

Full Review Source: Combustible Celluloid | comment Comment
05/12/06
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Jeffrey M. Anderson
Combustible Celluloid

Staged with credibility and loads of Cubano flair, the film slows to a sludgy crawl, giving us lots of time to consider it as a pro-old-guard, anti- revolutionary elegy.

Full Review Source: Village Voice | comment Comment
04/25/06
Michael Atkinson
Michael Atkinson
Village Voice

Handsomely executed but hopelessly flawed.

Full Review Source: Palo Alto Weekly | comment Comment
05/10/06
Jeanne Aufmuth
Jeanne Aufmuth
Palo Alto Weekly

... full of characters with import more symbolic than dramatic (Bill Murray plays a veritable court jester), ideas that wander and contradictions that dissipate.

Full Review Source: Seattle Post-Intelligencer | comment Comment
05/18/06
Sean Axmaker
Sean Axmaker
Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Even though the movie is made with an abundance of heart, it's sad to report that the final result has only a weak pulse.

Full Review Source: Austin Chronicle | comment Comment
06/24/06
Marjorie Baumgarten
Marjorie Baumgarten
Austin Chronicle

Book-ended by fine songs; in between, Garcia offers more than two hours of clumsy Coppola/Scorsese karaoke...

Full Review Source: Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN) | comment Comment
06/26/06
John Beifuss
John Beifuss
Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN)

How the movie's politics will sit with the audience aside, one of the problems in this overlong melodrama is the distracting casting of Bill Murray as a wisecracking sidekick and Dustin Hoffman as mobster Meyer Lansky.

Full Review Source: New York Daily News | comment Comment
04/28/06
Jami Bernard
Jami Bernard
New York Daily News

A pretty bauble, a trinket offered when the stakes of barter were life and death.

Full Review Source: Denver Post | comment Comment
05/26/06
Michael Booth
Michael Booth
Denver Post

Garcia's storytelling lacks highs and lows and has far too much going on. And on.

Full Review Source: Jam! Movies | comment Comment
07/01/06
Liz Braun
Liz Braun
Jam! Movies

Garcia's overindulgence is punishing but I didn't come to the theatre to be soaked in soap opera sentiment.

Full Review Source: Cinema Signals | comment Comment
03/30/06
Jules Brenner
Jules Brenner
Cinema Signals

Garcia obviously has more ambition than skill.

Full Review Source: Cinematical | comment Comment
09/18/07
Christopher Campbell
Christopher Campbell
Cinematical

Musical...handsome...poignantly nostalgic...The Lost City is a lot of things, but what it's not is incisive.

Full Review Source: Groucho Reviews | comment Comment
05/12/06
Peter Canavese
Peter Canavese
Groucho Reviews

... when it finds its footing, it becomes the movie it longs to be. And that happens often enough to make it worth finding, even when it seems as lost as the city it loves.

Full Review Source: Las Vegas Review-Journal | comment Comment
06/23/06
Carol Cling
Carol Cling
Las Vegas Review-Journal
 
 
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