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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: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.

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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1 - 20 (sorted by date)
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When it succeeds, the film conveys a bittersweet longing for a lost moment and the unfulfilled promise of a democratic Cuba.

Full Review Source: Hollywood Reporter | comment Comment
08/01/06
Sheri Linden
Sheri Linden
Hollywood Reporter
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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
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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
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Unsteady but often entrancing.

Full Review Source: Arizona Republic | comment Comment
06/22/06
Bill Muller
Bill Muller
Arizona Republic
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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
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Turgid, lumpy and almost unwatchably dull.

Full Review Source: Toronto Star | comment Comment
06/16/06
Geoff Pevere
Geoff Pevere
Toronto Star
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Unfortunately, Garcia is inept as a director. His scenes are shapeless and bloated with self-important speeches.

Full Review Source: Globe and Mail | comment Comment
06/16/06
Liam Lacey
Liam Lacey
Globe and Mail
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Too scattered, too confused, too patched-together to work dramatically.

Full Review Source: Detroit News | comment Comment
06/09/06
Tom Long
Tom Long
Detroit News
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The movie has too many stories to tell and tells none of them very well.

Full Review Source: Detroit Free Press | comment Comment
06/09/06
Terry Lawson
Terry Lawson
Detroit Free Press
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Somewhere amid the bric-a-brac -- hot rhythms, ocean breezes and political upheaval and melodrama -- a movie languishes. Garcia never really finds it.

Full Review Source: Denver Rocky Mountain News | comment Comment
05/26/06
Robert Denerstein
Robert Denerstein
Denver Rocky Mountain News
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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
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Lovely to look at, and its mixture of Cuban standards and Garcia originals is delightful to listen to.

Full Review Source: Dallas Morning News | comment Comment
05/25/06
Philip Wuntch
Philip Wuntch
Dallas Morning News
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Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie -- a depressed epic.

Full Review Source: Entertainment Weekly | comment Comment
05/20/06
Owen Gleiberman
Owen Gleiberman
Entertainment Weekly
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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
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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.

Full Review Source: Washington Post | comment Comment
05/18/06
Stephen Hunter
Stephen Hunter
Washington Post
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'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
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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.

Full Review Source: San Francisco Chronicle | comment Comment
05/12/06
Mick LaSalle
Mick LaSalle
San Francisco Chronicle
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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
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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
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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
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