The Lost City

Andy Garcia’s first feature as director, an abortive anti-Marxist epic about the Cuban revolution, follows the fortunes of a wealthy Havana family, with Garcia as one of the sons, a nightclub owner. The script is credited to the late, great Cuban expatriate novelist G. Cabrera Infante, but the only traces of his wit are in a closing title and the treatment of Che Guevara (Jsu Garcia) and gangster Meyer Lansky (Dustin Hoffman); Infante also appears as a character of sorts, though casting Bill Murray as such a multicultural figure goes beyond grotesquerie to incoherence. Garcia seems to be aping the Godfather movies and Warren Beatty’s Reds, but the movie’s gracefulness is limited to its handling of the music (some of which Garcia wrote). With Ines Sastre, Tomas Milian, and Lorena Feijoo. R, 143 min. (JR)

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