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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: Not Rated

Runtime: 2 hrs 23 mins

Genre: Dramas

Theatrical Release:2006

Box Office: $2,434,066

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

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Release:

Aug 8, 2006

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Reviews for The Lost City

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For a tribute to a lost city, Garcia has made a lost film.

Full Review Source: Arizona Daily Star | comment Comment
06/29/06
Phil Villarreal
Phil Villarreal
Arizona Daily Star

Unsteady but often entrancing.

Full Review Source: Arizona Republic | comment Comment
06/22/06
Bill Muller
Bill Muller
Arizona Republic
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

...plays like a confusing and inferior Caribbean analog to The Godfather, without anything like the narrative drive of Coppola's film.

Full Review Source: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette | comment Comment
07/22/06
Philip Martin
Philip Martin
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

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
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Somehow simultaneously too much and not enough. At 143 minutes, it well overstays its welcome as a movie, but with a little more fleshing out it might have worked as a miniseries.

Full Review Source: Atlanta Journal-Constitution | comment Comment
06/22/06
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie
Eleanor Ringel Gillespie
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

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

As a director, Garcia is such a sucker for gratuitous crosscutting and glossily elliptical filmmaking that viewers can be forgiven for mistaking Lost City for a 143-minute montage sequence.

Full Review Source: AV Club | comment Comment
05/04/06
Nathan Rabin
Nathan Rabin
AV Club

It's the sort of epic that aspires to tell Cuba's modern political history and celebrate its people without introducing us to a single believable character.

Full Review Source: Boston Globe | comment Comment
05/12/06
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Boston Globe
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Our cue that Garcia is acting is when he furiously bats his eyes in his smoldering emotional scenes. Either that, or he's allergic to the smoke from all those Cuban cigars.

Full Review Source: Boulder Weekly | comment Comment
06/02/06
Thomas Delapa
Thomas Delapa
Boulder Weekly

... 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

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

The film suggests a dutiful if clunky pastiche of The Godfather and a right-wing Reds, with Fellove and his brothers and parents representing a spectrum of possible responses to the Cuban revolution.

Full Review Source: Chicago Reader | comment Comment
05/19/06
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Jonathan Rosenbaum
Chicago Reader
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Feels like the distillation of countless conversations and family legends, rehearsed from time immemorial by Cubans who fled their homeland and sought to re-create it in their memories.

Full Review Source: Chicago Sun-Times | comment Comment
05/12/06
Roger Ebert
Roger Ebert
Chicago Sun-Times
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

Throbbing with music, seething with anger and romance, The Lost City is a film that breaks your heart, bewilders, alienates and ravishes you by turns.

Full Review Source: Chicago Tribune | comment Comment
05/11/06
Michael Wilmington
Michael Wilmington
Chicago Tribune
Top Critic Icon Top Critic

A lot goes wrong in this overlong movie, but it has a human touch.

Full Review Source: Christian Science Monitor | comment Comment
04/27/06
Peter Rainer
Peter Rainer
Christian Science Monitor

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

Unfolds like a series of as outtakes from Hollywood productions

Full Review Source: CinePassion | comment Comment
08/30/09
Fernando F. Croce
Fernando F. Croce
CinePassion

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

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)
 
 
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