City Island: Critic Reviews

Andy Garcia reminds you of what a cunning, likable actor he can be.

A professionally executed farce of the yelling-family variety.

This feature might work better as a television series, but Garcia himself gives the picture some much-needed ballast.

All the performances are warmly engaging, even though the characters are broad and scenarios occasionally extreme. For those tired of clashing titans or weepy teen romances, City Island is a breath of fresh air.

A very funny film, and one that operates at the sea level of humanity. Quaint. Slightly peculiar.

The movie's comic machinery never stops clanking long enough for us to relax and genuinely enjoy the silliness. But the actors are enjoying themselves, and that goes a very long way.

An affectionate portrait of a lower-middle-class, outer-borough clan, City Island works best as an actor's showcase, with Margulies's aggrieved, simmering wife the stand-out.

The performances are absurdly broad, and each story line is more outlandish than the last. But De Felitta's approach is so easygoing, and the waterside setting so irresistibly charming, you're bound to walk out in a great mood.

[A] noisy, eccentric, bizarrely lovable film.

I can think of far less pleasant ways to pass 100 minutes -- many of them playing now at a theater near you.

[It] won't put [Garcia] back on the main road, but he tries some new things in it, and it's fun to watch him work.

Garcia and Margulies, who worked so well together in George Hickenlooper's Man from Elysian Fields, show a sure feel for comedy here...

City Island scrapes by and delivers a smile or two because it does contain a fundamental understanding of the rot that sets in when people hide their true selves from the ones they love.

Feeble but well-stuffed comedy.

City Island runs through its stockpile of impossibly melodramatic scenarios and manages to make them, and the respective Rizzos in their throes, feel genuine.

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 funny, heartfelt look at families, relationships and the lies that prop them up as much as tear them down.

Another expertly written joyride through the confines of narrowminded provincialism to cleansing self-awareness from indie director de Felitta.

De Felitta, who directed the wonderful Two Family House (2000), has a great feel for New York City's further reaches and a very sure hand with actors.

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.

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.

A treat for movie lovers everywhere -- even if you've never heard of the community where it takes place.

Writer-director Raymond de Felitta understands that a proper farce, like a good campfire, needs plenty of friction to get started.

All the family secrets must come crashing together, of course, in an implausible, if impeccably crafted, collision of botched confessions, mistaken identities, handcuffs and risque outfits.

An indie of the sort that achieved popularity during the 1990s but which has since fallen out of favor, City Island offers jokes worth laughing at and characters who earn their good turns of fortune.