The Lost City 2005

Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times: As a musical fever dream of paradise lost, The Lost City is a flawed success, boasting just enough truth and admirable purpose to justify the hazards of Garcia's passion. Read more

Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune: 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. Read more

Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper: Garcia, who fled the country with his family as a young boy, obviously has a fierce passion for this material, and he knows to his very soul. Read more

Eleanor Ringel Gillespie, Atlanta Journal-Constitution: 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. Read more

Nathan Rabin, AV Club: 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. Read more

Bill Muller, Arizona Republic: Unsteady but often entrancing. Read more

Wesley Morris, Boston Globe: 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. Read more

Mark Olsen, Los Angeles Times: ... a haphazard jumble. Read more

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader: 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. Read more

Bruce Westbrook, Houston Chronicle: It's handsome and heartfelt but mired in murky politics, plot inertia, musical montages and painfully pointed symbolism. Read more

Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor: A lot goes wrong in this overlong movie, but it has a human touch. Read more

Michael Booth, Denver Post: A pretty bauble, a trinket offered when the stakes of barter were life and death. Read more

Tom Long, Detroit News: Too scattered, too confused, too patched-together to work dramatically. Read more

Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly: Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie -- a depressed epic. Read more

Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press: The movie has too many stories to tell and tells none of them very well. Read more

Philip Wuntch, Dallas Morning News: Lovely to look at, and its mixture of Cuban standards and Garcia originals is delightful to listen to. Read more

David Germain, Associated Press: Garcia needed better guiding hands and eyes in the editing room to jettison the many parts that bog down the story. Read more

Tim Grierson, L.A. Weekly: Compelling in fits and starts, actor-director Andy Garcia's The Lost City possesses grand aspirations but troublesome execution. Read more

Rene Rodriguez, Miami Herald: Despite the strong emotional connection many Miamians will feel toward the movie, The Lost City falls far short of the sweep, complexity and passion it strives for. Read more

Lisa Rose, Newark Star-Ledger: ... a lost movie that seems like it takes 16 years to end. Read more

Jami Bernard, New York Daily News: How the movie's politics will sit with the audience aside, one of the problems in this overlong melodrama is the distracting casting of Bill Murray as a wisecracking sidekick and Dustin Hoffman as mobster Meyer Lansky. Read more

Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel: It's barely coherent as it is, but at 2 hours and 23 minutes, The Lost City is simply infuriating. Read more

Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times: 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. Read more

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle: 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. Read more

Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune: '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!' Read more

St. Louis Post-Dispatch: Read more

Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail: Unfortunately, Garcia is inept as a director. His scenes are shapeless and bloated with self-important speeches. Read more

Geoff Pevere, Toronto Star: Turgid, lumpy and almost unwatchably dull. Read more

Tom Huddlestone, Time Out: 'The Lost City' is intriguing as a historical document and adequate as cinema, but it has a blandness at its core that no amount of spicy mambo and booty-quaking dance routines can disguise. Read more

Scott Foundas, Variety: Somewhere inside this overlong, sometimes engaging, often tedious affair, there may be a solid, 100-minute movie. Read more

Michael Atkinson, Village Voice: Staged with credibility and loads of Cubano flair, the film slows to a sludgy crawl, giving us lots of time to consider it as a pro-old-guard, anti- revolutionary elegy. Read more

Stephen Hunter, Washington Post: 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. Read more