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Critics reviews

THE LOST CITY OF Z

James Gray United States, 2016
James Gray's exquisitely crafted and truly visionary film from the life of early-20th-century explorer Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam) is about something seemingly ephemeral and difficult to name and yet true to so many lives: the search within the physical world for a transcendent reality that is finally to be found right here and now. Gray doesn't simply dramatize this existential path: he embodies int in the form of the film itself.
January 3, 2018
Ferdy on Films
Fawcett's tale of real-life daring and fixation has all the hallmarks of a type of adventure tale that feels all but by-gone, but Gray's approach pointedly disassembles the Boy's Own side of Fawcett's ventures and instead transmutes them into a cinematic work that calls to mind other portraits but which Gray bends to his own purpose, placing his emphasis not in derring-do so much as personal states of seeing and understanding.
July 11, 2017
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Fawcett is desperate for money to make his discovery, but if no one will back him he will go on what he can scrounge; he will go where his many journeys tell him there is something to be found, he will assure his wife that he will succeed, he will double the stakes by taking his son, he will never give up, he will give size to his life. The film is rich with this passionate intensity, which is exactly what a man needs to put together a big film in his late forties while the clock is ticking.
May 9, 2017
At times filled with mist and awe, and at other times thrillingly heart-racing (arrows—they shoot right at you!), The Lost City of Z feels like a gem dug out from a time capsule.
April 27, 2017
Whereas The Immigrant's fragmented slivers of the Lower East Side circa 1920 managed to suggest a vastness just beyond the main character's glimpse, Lost City's elisions of context are too conspicuous. The onscreen abundance is less than you'd get in a normal historical epic, lending a certain preciousness to the images.
April 24, 2017
Gray and cinematographer Darius Khondji shoot the jungle not with the rawness of those films but rather with alluring sublimity, characterized by the amber hues they developed in The Immigrant. As Fawcett moves closer to his goal, his motivations transform, and while the mysteries of what await him in Z hold a power that Gray finds as fascinating as Fawcett does, ambiguities of its cost emerge in equal measure with its potential triumph.
April 24, 2017
Like Gray's other movies, Lost City feels classical in its storytelling and cinematic grammar, making it unlike most other films being made today. At the same time, the film advances modern views about women and imperialism that one doesn't find in, say, the historical epics of David Lean, whom Gray cited as an influence when he presented Lost City (from his personal 35-millimeter print) at the Music Box last Sunday night.
April 21, 2017
On the one hand [the Amazon] offered Gray an opportunity to mix the John Ford of The Quiet Man, glimpsed in Fawcett's life back in the UK, and the John Ford of Arrowsmith and The Hurricane, beset by tropical fevers and storms, in thrall to nature's vicious whims. Whatever brought him there, Gray takes it to the jungle just as expertly as he does Brighton Beach or the Q train. Like Fawcett he finds new meaning, new languages, new sounds and spirits.
April 14, 2017
I don't think I've ever been more impressed by Gray's film sense... though I must confess that it is also the movie of his that has moved me the least... I haven't shaken what reservations I have about The Lost City of Z, but watching it a second time... I was hit with a strong conviction that _this is a movie_. That is to say, it's a thing of sculpted light and shadow which shows pure pleasure in the sleight of an associative cut which turns a rivulet of whiskey into a moving train.
April 14, 2017
Hunnam's performance is charming and lived in, easily the best work he's ever done, and scene for scene, this is a splendid film. It's beautiful to look at but never ostentatiously pretty, and wise about how to use actual historical events as metaphors for basic desires (to succeed, to redeem oneself). The film never forgets that that these were real people whose words and deeds had consequences that should not be swept under the carpet for the sake of a happy ending.
April 14, 2017
The movie is neither Indiana Jones escapism nor a Malick-like reverie about nature, but something in between, a more grounded and troubled vision of human aspirations and imperfections. Gray may be working from an amalgam of literary, filmic, and historical influences, but in following Fawcett off the path, he stakes out his own distinctly bewitching territory.
April 13, 2017
It is a beautiful film with many small wonders and mysteries of its own for the viewer to discover... The sweep and Tolstoy-esque detail of the scenes of social life in mid-1900s Ireland and England, which bring to mind Michael Cimino's attempts to re-sculpt the New Hollywood auteur cult in the image of 19th century fiction in films like The Deer Hunter and Heaven's Gate. In the character of Fawcett, it finds both the poetry and the pathology of exploration.
April 13, 2017