City Island

The lies family members tell each other form the basis for many an overheated melodrama, but few as entertainingly OTT as ‘City Island’. Andy Garcia plays Vince, a working-class family man who hides his passion for acting from wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies). Their daughter (Dominik Garcia-Lorido) can’t admit she strips to pay for college, while son Vince Jr (Ezra Miller, so good in ‘Afterschool’) has a furtive passion for chubby women.

The movie is a mixed bag: for every keen insight there’s a cliché, for every quiet character moment a scene of outrageous overacting – Garcia, for instance, lays on the Common Man routine with a trowel. But these flaws don’t detract from what is an enjoyable, thoughtful and old fashioned celebration of human flaws and familial foibles. Writer-director Raymond De Felitta – who made a splash last year with excellent jazz doc ‘ ’Tis Autumn’ – displays a sure hand, and it all comes together in a wonderfully unrestrained climactic scene of pure melodramatic overkill. Great fun.