MOVIE - City Island

A new favorite
Released 3-10-10
PG-13 (1:43)
5/13/10 at El con with Laraine
RT: 84% cag: 95%
Director: Raymond de Felitta

Andy Garcia, Julianna Marguilies, Steven Strait

This is the best movie I've seen since Sunshine Cleaning, which I adored. El Con movie theater is a mainstream movie theater that uses one of its 20 theaters for movies with less buzz...or something like that....because it's the only place those movies play in town. And then it had Andy Garcia and Julianna Marguilies that drew me even more. Sooooo entertaining. Soooo funny. Such great acting.

Andy Garcia plays Vince Rizzo, a corrections officer in a prison near New York City. He lives on an island off the Bronx. A real place, I'd never heard of it. He has a quirky, funny family that is in a bit of a crisis....he and his wife (Marguiles) are keeping secrets from each other, the college daughter is also keeping major secrets from her parents, and the high school son has an obsession that's just a riot. If I tell any of the particulars it will ruin the story, because it's watching these secrets unfold that make it so entrancing. The major secret is the glue that binds the entire movie, and that is a young man who is incarcerated at the prison where Rizzo works. So good, so good, so good! (and so is the acting. Ezra Miller, the young man who plays the son, is just TERRIFIC, sweet and funny, and Steven Strait, the young "hoodlum" is fantastic...and soooo great to look at!

In one scene, Garcia and Emily Watson (another lead) are traveling in a tram above the city. I've got to look this up. I love New York. I've researched it, I've adventured all over. But a tram? That's a new one for me!
I'd go to this one again tonight. Hmmmm. Maybe I will!