When it succeeds, the film conveys a bittersweet longing for a lost moment and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic Cuba.
The Lost City (2006)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:29
Fresh:7
Rotten:22
Average Rating:4.5/10
Consensus: Its heart is in the right place, but what starts as a promising exercise devolves into an overlong, unevenly directed disappointment.
Theatrical Release: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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Reviews for The Lost City
It's handsome and heartfelt but mired in murky politics, plot inertia, musical montages and painfully pointed symbolism.
Garcia needed better guiding hands and eyes in the editing room to jettison the many parts that bog down the story.
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.
Unfortunately, Garcia is inept as a director. His scenes are shapeless and bloated with self-important speeches.
Too scattered, too confused, too patched-together to work dramatically.
The movie has too many stories to tell and tells none of them very well.
Somewhere amid the bric-a-brac -- hot rhythms, ocean breezes and political upheaval and melodrama -- a movie languishes. Garcia never really finds it.
A pretty bauble, a trinket offered when the stakes of barter were life and death.
Lovely to look at, and its mixture of Cuban standards and Garcia originals is delightful to listen to.
Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie -- a depressed epic.
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.
A tribute to pre-revolutionary Havana, an elegy on what was lost, a little payback for a regime that drove his family out and, best of all, a synthesis of the driving Afro-Cuban rhythms of the extraordinary music.
'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!'
The Lost City has a subject, a setting and a historical backdrop, but in the foreground it has a relatively passive protagonist, Fico, whose passions are understated and whose fortunes inspire only minor concern.
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.
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.
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.
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
|---|---|
| 77% 77% | The Hangover |
| 88% 88% | Inglourious Basterds |
| 66% 66% | Public Enemies |
| 24% 24% | G-Force |
| 44% 44% | Night at the Museum: B… |
| Tomatometer Percentage | Movie |
|---|---|
| 82% 82% | Paranormal Activity |
| 58% 58% | 9 |
| 44% 44% | Jennifer's Body |
| 58% 58% | A Perfect Getaway |
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