Average Rating: 6.8/10
Reviews Counted: 98
Fresh: 79 | Rotten: 19
Raymond De Felitta combines warmth, humanity, and a natural sense of humor, and is abetted by Andy Garcia and an excellent ensemble cast.
Average Rating: 7.2/10
Critic Reviews: 29
Fresh: 25 | Rotten: 4
Raymond De Felitta combines warmth, humanity, and a natural sense of humor, and is abetted by Andy Garcia and an excellent ensemble cast.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.6/5
User Ratings: 27,528
A dysfunctional family living on a picturesque island in the Bronx spares no expense in avoiding the truth about their messed-up lives in writer/director Raymond de Felitta's dark family comedy. The family patriarch, Vince (Andy Garcia) is a prison guard who is secretly plotting a new career as an actor. Meanwhile, as Vince takes acting lessons on the down low, his daughter moonlights as a stripper and his younger namesake harbors a secret fetish that involves the family's 300-pound neighbor.
Mar 19, 2010 Wide
Aug 24, 2010
$6.7M
Anchor Bay Entertainment
All Critics (98) | Top Critics (29) | Fresh (80) | Rotten (19) | DVD (7)
Andy Garcia demonstrates real comic chops in this charming comedy of family dysfunction.
This is the kind of movie that could easily sink into comedy hijinks as broad and flat as pappardelle. But it doesn't. De Felitta... makes no apologies for the outrageousness of the coincidences and gloriously knotty relationships and secrets.
Writer-director Raymond De Felitta has cut together a frustrating comedy, with the misunderstandings piling up like kindling for a bonfire that his movie never lights.
A funny, heartfelt look at families, relationships and the lies that prop them up as much as tear them down.
Writer-director Raymond De Felitta is essentially offering a kinky-comic New Yawk version of a Greek tragedy here, and even if the whole thing is pretty implausible, it's also fairly entertaining.
[A] noisy, eccentric, bizarrely lovable film.
Andy Garcia is a pleasant enough guide to almost rate a visit to this City, but all the conflict here lies on the surface.
an enjoyably offbeat slice of amusingly dysfunctional family life
An enjoyable film.
Wacky film makes smoking, teen fetish part of the joke.
De Felitta chose well by casting 24-year-old actor Steven Strait, who gives the exasperated convict humor, charm, and sex appeal - something that doesn't go unnoticed by Joyce, or many of the women in the audience as well.
Melding the abundant misunderstandings of a Shakespeare comedy with the New York wit of a Neil Simon play, City Island is a boisterous charmer with a big heart.
Everybody has a secret and is too dumb to work out what those secrets are, a specious bit of plotting designed to pad out the running time of this shrill farce beyond its natural sit-com length.
This feature might work better as a television series, but Garcia himself gives the picture some much-needed ballast.
There's nothing earth-shatteringly new, but you do end up wishing the characters well, and I was happy to have spent time with them.
I won't make great claims for Raymond De Felitta's film - it hardly makes them for itself - but I will say this for it: as an ensemble acting workout, it exceeds expectations from the top down.
An at-times marvellous muddle of high farce and low-brow chuckles.
This isn't a revolution in filmmaking, but a rare kind of comedy where the actors keep it real.
The script, by dyed-in-the-wool New York indie filmmaker Raymond De Felitta, is like someone's homework for a screenwriting course. The secrets aren't interesting and you know a big showdown at the end is a given.
Garcia's gift for comedy is a true revelation.
Sweet and satisfying.
Impressively directed and superbly written, this is an emotionally engaging, warm-hearted and frequently funny family drama with terrific central performances from Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies.
Its revelations come too early, and many of its scenes are too long, but City Island is kept afloat by its unusual location and fine-tuned performances.
I would say that if you have a distaste for indie comedies about quirky families that co-star Alan Arkin, think twice.
Fiery, loud, and funny! Everyone in the Rizzo family harbors secrets: smoking, stripping, stealing. They're hinted at in cute, little montages, and then they explode in a huge, Greek climax that shouldn't work in a creative writing sense, but the humor and absurdity of it all is a juggernaut that compels the
May 23, 2010Super Reviewer
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