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Average User Score: 8 (4 sources)

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mharvey10

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This is such a beautiful movie. It is also very violent. It focuses on the revolution from the standpoint of how divisive and violent it was. It's an interesting juxtaposition of smooth (the endless sea, the music) and rough (interrogations,...
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This is such a beautiful movie. It is also very violent. It focuses on the revolution from the standpoint of how divisive and violent it was. It's an interesting juxtaposition of smooth (the endless sea, the music) and rough (interrogations, death). It doesn't strike me as an even-handed look, but I'm pleased to see a movie refuse to glamorize revolutionaries after The Motorcycle Diaries. Revolutionaries are brutal. Does that say something about their cause? Not necessarily. But many revolutionaries are merely mercenaries - attracted to the violence.

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Posted feb 3, 2008 11:03 am pt

Gallego3

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Posted jan 19, 2007 3:15 am pt

Gallego

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The movie takes place during the revolution of Fidel Castro. Andy Garcia plays Fico Fellove, a club owner. Fico is faced with the difficult task of keeping his family together while the revolution rages on. The movie portraits what happen to most...
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The movie takes place during the revolution of Fidel Castro. Andy Garcia plays Fico Fellove, a club owner. Fico is faced with the difficult task of keeping his family together while the revolution rages on. The movie portraits what happen to most families when the revolution came and went. It takes a neutral stand, neither pro or con of the revolution. It is also a tribute to the beutiful Cuban music that was lost after the revolution. A beautiful dramatic movie that I would recommend to anyone that its interested on the events that took place during the revolution.

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Posted dec 15, 2006 3:58 am pt

• [+] Chicago Tribune
  
  75
  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.

  by Michael Wilmington | Read Full Review »
• [+] Chicago Sun-Times
  
  75
  The movie evokes that long-ago world carefully and with a certain poetry; it was shot in the Dominican Republic. There is a lot of music, much of it from the period and performed by the same musicians or their successors.

  by Roger Ebert | Read Full Review »
• [+] Washington Post
  
  70
  Some of the tropes of The Lost City are ineffective. What does work is the sense of loss. The late Cuban novelist and screenwriter G. Cabrera Infante finds a brilliant device in the love affair between Fico and Aurora (Ines Sastre), his sister-in-law, in that Aurora in some way becomes Cuba.

  by Stephen Hunter | Read Full Review »
• [+] Christian Science Monitor
  
  67
  What keeps the film watchable, aside from the vibrant musical numbers in the nightclub, is Garcia's obvious love for the Cuba of his ancestors, of his dreams. A lot goes wrong in this overlong movie, but it has a human touch.

  by Peter Rainer | Read Full Review »
• [+] Baltimore Sun
  
  67
  Watching The Lost City is like falling into a delirious dream on a marathon train ride only to be roused every 15 minutes by a conductor punching your ticket or barking out the next stop.

  by Michael Sragow | Read Full Review »
• [+] The Hollywood Reporter
  
  60
  A handsome production but one that struggles to integrate its various elements -- cabaret-society glamour, intellectual fervor, family drama, impossible romance and droll humor.

  by Sheri Linden | Read Full Review »
• [+] Variety
  
  50
  A handsomely produced, deeply passionate, but seriously flawed historical epic whose reach far exceeds its grasp. Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie.

  by Scott Foundas | Read Full Review »
• [+] New York Daily News
  
  50
  When an intensely emotional scene calls for the voice to break, call in Andy Garcia. He does the best voice-breaking, half-choked sob of anguish in the business, and he does it a lot in Lost City, his well-meaning directorial debut.

  by Jami Bernard | Read Full Review »
• [+] Miami Herald
  
  50
  Falls far short of the sweep, complexity and passion it seeks.

  by Rene Rodriguez | Read Full Review »
• [+] The New York Times
  
  50
  In its groggy way The Lost City holds your attention. Incoherent, but splendidly panoramic and drenched in wonderful Cuban music, it has the texture of a vivid, intoxicating dream that seems to mean something until you wake up and feel it slipping away. All that remains are feelings and impressions connected by a mood.

  by Stephen Holden | Read Full Review »
• [+] Los Angeles Times
  
  50
  In an era when so many films are cynical, cash-grabbing mechanisms of global corporate culture, no more and no less, it is frustrating to come across a work such as this, in which the grasp-exceeding reach and reckless vision of its creators become the biggest drawbacks rather than the film's greatest assets.

  by Mark Olsen | Read Full Review »
• [+] TV Guide
  
  50
  Bill Murray plays the secondary role of a nameless American gag writer brimming with one-liners about the absurdity of Cuban life, Dustin Hoffman has a cameo as kvetching gangster Meyer Lansky.

  by Maitland McDonagh | Read Full Review »
• [+] Seattle Post-Intelligencer
  
  50
  For all the color and lively music, it's an overlong, messy labor of love built on a sense of personal betrayal that rings hollow.

  by Sean Axmaker | Read Full Review »
• [+] Austin Chronicle
  
  50
  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.

  by Marjorie Baumgarten | Read Full Review »
• [+] San Francisco Chronicle
  
  50
  The story may be scattered and sagging and the picture may have little emotional impact -- certainly nothing to justify the epic running time -- but Garcia at least succeeds in making Havana in the 1950s seem like a vibrant, special place. He doesn't exactly make the audience care, but he does make the audience understand why he cares, and that's something.

  by Mick LaSalle | Read Full Review »