City Island

From MovieLine Written by S.T. VanAirsdale

City Island: I never wanted Raymond De Felitta to direct again after his agonizingly saccharine 2005 dramedy The Thing About My Folks. The synopsis of his latest film — featuring Andy Garcia and Julianna Margulies as a couple with arguably the most sequestered private lives in New York’s most sequestered suburb — didn’t encourage me either. I was wrong. Not because De Felitta has sudden mastery of relationships, style, or anything else, really, but because his cast inhabits an utterly unbelievable premise with genuine presence and soul. I still don’t know what Emily Mortimer was doing in there, but trade her for Alan Arkin’s acting-coach curmudgeon and you break even. And Garcia, all stifled ambition and goombah sincerity, supplies his best work in years. City Island is worth seeing for his amateur-audition sequence alone. Never mind the last five minutes.