The Lost City (2006) Critic Reviews

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

A handsome production but one that struggles to integrate its various elements -- cabaret-society glamour, intellectual fervor, family drama, impossible romance and droll humor.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

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.Read the full review

Though the filmmaker's feel for his Cuban heritage is bone-deep, it's a glazed and dolorous movie - a depressed epic.Read the full review

Garcia might have thought he was making a Cuban "Casablanca," but his big, empty spectacle amounts to less than a hill of beans.Read the full review