Nothing is Real With Andy Garcia, Julianna Margulies on ‘City Island’

CHICAGO – A blue collar worker father who has a secret Marlon Brando obsession (gasp!), a son with an improbable fetish and a daughter who quits college to…strip, this is a normal day-in-the-life in the new film “City Island.”

Rating: 3.0/5.0

Andy Garcia is Vince Rizzo, a prison guard at a jail on City Island, a village within the Bronx borough of New York City. He is a family man, with wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies), son Vince Jr. (Ezra Miller) and college age daughter Vivian (Dominik García-Lorido, Garcia’s real-life daughter). Vince is somewhat frustrated with his life, harboring a secret desire to be an actor, in the mold of his hero Marlon Brando.

But he is not the only family member with a secret. Vince Jr. is a typical teen-ager, except for his strange online fixation with porcine women. Vivian has lost a scholarship from her college so logically she becomes a stripper. And Joyce, the quintessential Bronx housewife, can’t seem to stop her secret…smoking (double gasp!).

To thicken the plot even more, Vince volunteers to take in a rehabilitating prisoner named Tony Nardella (Steven Strait), because he is his secret son (no more gasps left). This all happens while Vince lies to Joyce to take secret acting classes with a autocratic instructor (Alan Arkin), where he meets a fellow student (Emily Mortimer), who has some secrets of her own. Can anybody be true to themselves in this picture?

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “City Island” [15]

All in the Family: Andy Garcia (center) and (clockwise from top left) Dominik García-Lorido, Julianna Margulies, Ezra Miller and Steven Strait in ‘City Island’ Photo Credit: Phil Caruso for © City Island, Inc.

Continue reading for Patrick McDonald’s full review of “City Island” [15]