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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 rotten rating; UK critics are listed first)
Text View | 1 2 3 4 5 >> >|
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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

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

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

Not an embarrassment, but definitely a missed opportunity.

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

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

‘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

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
N/R

Click to read the article

Full Review Source: St. Louis Post-Dispatch | comment Comment
05/27/06
St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Havana may remain, in many ways, a lost city, but it'll take more than this movie to find it.

Full Review Source: E! Online | comment Comment
04/28/06
E! Online

...even trying to put [politics] aside, The Lost City has a number of problems.

Full Review Source: Los Angeles CityBeat | comment Comment
04/27/06
Andy Klein
Andy Klein
Los Angeles CityBeat

Shapeless stories that drift away from the revolution, puffed up by a biased take on 1959 Cuba with the hot air of romance.

Full Review Source: Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada) | comment 1 Comment
07/01/06
Brian Gibson
Brian Gibson
Vue Weekly (Edmonton, Canada)

It's handsome and heartfelt but mired in murky politics, plot inertia, musical montages and painfully pointed symbolism.

Full Review Source: Houston Chronicle | comment Comment
06/23/06
Bruce Westbrook
Bruce Westbrook
Houston Chronicle

What makes this movie interesting is the family (and not just because it's made up of 3 beautiful brothers). It's a love story, between a man and a woman and between a people and their country.

Full Review Source: TheMovieChicks.com | comment Comment
05/26/06
Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone
Cherryl Dawson and Leigh Ann Palone
TheMovieChicks.com

You can see why Garcia was drawn to this material, but he hasn't had much luck shaping it into a film.

Full Review Source: St. Paul Pioneer Press | comment Comment
05/18/06
Chris Hewitt (St. Paul)
Chris Hewitt (St. Paul)
St. Paul Pioneer Press

'That's not filmmaking,' I thought, 'that's photography.' 'That's not acting, that's posing.' 'That's not Jon Lovitz, it's Andy Garcia!'

Full Review Source: Minneapolis Star Tribune | comment Comment
05/18/06
Colin Covert
Colin Covert
Minneapolis Star Tribune

The coming CD, not the DVD, should be the keeper.

Full Review Source: San Diego Union-Tribune | comment Comment
05/26/06
David Elliott
David Elliott
San Diego Union-Tribune

Garcia needed better guiding hands and eyes in the editing room to jettison the many parts that bog down the story.

Full Review Source: Associated Press | comment Comment
06/23/06
David Germain
David Germain
Associated Press

The result has a potluck rather than persuasive, integrated quality.

Full Review Source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel | comment Comment
06/30/06
Duane Dudek
Duane Dudek
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Garcia offers the film to the Cuban community as something we should all be happy to see, but his esteem does not excuse the film's aesthetic mediocrity, cultural ignorance, and colossal self-absorption.

Full Review Source: Slant Magazine | comment Comment
04/21/06
Ed Gonzalez
Ed Gonzalez
Slant Magazine

... the film seems like a mini-series edited to feature length without time for character development.

Full Review Source: Boxoffice Magazine | comment Comment
04/28/06
Ed Scheid
Ed Scheid
Boxoffice Magazine
 
 
1 - 20 (sorted by rotten rating; UK critics are listed first)
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