in the heights movie review essay

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It’s here! Jubilant, unapologetically massive, and bursting with a cozy, melancholic sense of communal belonging, “In The Heights” is the biggest-screen-you-can-find Hollywood event that we the movie lovers have been craving since the early days of the pandemic, when the health crisis cut off one of our most cherished public lifelines. A dazzling New York movie that honors the diverse Latinx communities of Upper Manhattan like its boisterous source—the multi-award-winning stage musical that put Lin-Manuel Miranda on the showbiz map before his fame exploded with “ Hamilton ”—this exuberant screen adaptation (with at least one delightful “Hamilton” Easter Egg) is ready to welcome you back into your neighborhood cinema with open arms, daring to light up that dark room in ways much bigger and brighter than you might remember. 

Yes, it’s simply an overwhelming experience, to float weightlessly during the nearly 145-minute running time of “In The Heights.” And don’t let that number scare you off—the whole thing passes breezily like a New York minute, dancing its way through one typically humid and sweaty summer of the urban island’s Washington Heights, pitched on the brink of a soul-killing blackout. Sitting on a picturesque tropical beach and telling his tale to a company of adorable kids early on in the film (a smart, recurring narrative anchor that resolves to a satisfying conclusion), “The streets were made of music,” says the movie’s heart and soul Usnavi de la Vega. Here, he is played by your new favorite leading man Anthony Ramos , who revives Miranda’s Broadway role in an irresistibly likable, instantly star-making performance after holding a number of memorable parts in the likes of “ Monsters and Men ,” “ White Girl ,” and “A Star is Born.” 

It’s shrewd of the chief creative helmers, a trio consisting of virtuoso director Jon M. Chu , deft screenwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes (who also wrote the book for the stage musical and braids a number of well-constructed changes into this version) and of course, peerless creator Lin-Manuel Miranda (charismatically playing a street vendor selling icy fruity piraguas here), to emphasize the melodic nature of the barrio right at the start. This might sound like an obvious proposition for a production about a locale’s complex and colorful rhythms that fuse rap, hip-hop, and various Latin sounds like salsa and merengue, with traditional musical theater. But it’s also one that grants Chu with the spot-on set-up to declare, “Let me show you how!” and to flaunt the visual proof throughout with disarming disposition and jaw-dropping craft that coddles tight apartments, sunbaked alleys, scenic overlooks, fire-escapes and one gigantic public pool. Indeed, as a director who proved his kinetic muscles with the sophisticated romantic comedy “ Crazy Rich Asians ” (which is as close to a sense of choreographed musicality as a non-musical film can get) and is no stranger to dance in film, mostly thanks to his entries in the “Step Up” franchise, Chu might just convert even the fiercest skeptics of musicals that question the plausibility of a bunch of people launching into a random song-and-dance number.

To take it a step further, Chu grandly demonstrates that both the tenderness and the ideological vastness of “In The Heights” were always meant for the big screen in a way, rather than the confines of a physical stage. Your mind surrenders to Chu’s logic and vision entirely, believing that it does make all the sense in the world when Usnavi, a lovable immigrant orphan from the Dominican Republic with immediate dreams of returning to the island he considers a paradise, spins a manhole cover like a turntable, snaps a gate latch into place in a tempo matched by a splashy hose, and reflectively watches from inside his bodega as his entire neighborhood sings and dances, greeting a brand-new day outside of his window. And this is only the opening number, a spirited introduction to an array of personalities that almost brought this Turkish immigrant critic (who called the geographically and culturally adjacent, similarly vibrant Hamilton Heights home for over a decade) to her feet, alongside the loud but calming swooshes of fire hydrants.

That same introduction familiarizes us with the concept of a sueñito , a little dream, that everyone with a major part in “In The Heights” dearly holds. For the bodega owner Usnavi, the dream is not only to return to the happy Dominican Republic of his childhood, but also, to finally ask the intimidating Vanessa out on a date. Played with such seductive verve by Melissa Barrera , the aspiring fashion designer Vanessa on the other hand dreams of leaving her dead-end beauty salon job working alongside the head-strong, mischievously gossipy ladies Daniela ( Daphne Rubin-Vega ), Carla ( Stephanie Beatriz ) and Cuca ( Dascha Polanco ), and moving downtown to pursue her passion career. There's also the smart college student Nina Rosario (an immensely powerful Leslie Grace ), who yearns to reinstate her identity as a Latina on the heels of her dispiriting year at the white-dominant Stanford. Her plans to drop out of college disappoint Kevin ( Jimmy Smits ), her sacrificing father with high expectations of her, and surprise Benny ( Corey Hawkins , impossibly charming), a strong-willed, energetic dispatcher working at Kevin’s limo company. (You guessed it: he and Nina are in love.) Also in the mix, with a markedly more significant part than in the musical, is Usnavi’s cousin Sonny ( Gregory Diaz IV , effortlessly loveable), the kind of undocumented Dreamer unwelcome in the Trumpian trenches of the country. (Fans of the original musical will be quick to identify the instance in which Trump’s name gets swapped with Tiger Woods. “When I wrote it, he was an avatar for the Monopoly man. Then when time moves on and he becomes the stain on American democracy, you change the lyric,” Miranda recently said to Variety .) 

These characters collectively paint a big, beautiful canvas that the Heights matriarch Abuela Claudia ( Olga Merediz , absolutely heartrending in a revival of her famed stage role) seems to have taken under her wings since forever. Foreshadowing one of the movie’s most affecting and inspired sequences involving wistful vintage subway cars and her past as a hardworking immigrant, "Paciencia y Fe" (patience and faith) Abuela optimistically says as she waves her newly bought lottery ticket in the air. We soon learn that investing in the lottery is a widely shared routine in her streets—once Usnavi is informed of a winning ticket sold at his deli, the musical’s earth-shattering centerpiece “96,000” arrives. We try to keep up as hundreds of extras covet the big bad $96K prize, a hardly life-saving sum, but enough to make a fresh, life-changing start. Shot in the Highbridge Pool, this miraculous number (dexterously choreographed by Christopher Scott like the rest) of synchronized swimming and harmonic dancing in the tradition of Busby Berkeley brings the entire cast together with gusto, confidently reminding the audience the kind of movie that they are watching—a big motion picture that absolutely refuses to scale down its emotional scope and visual splendor.

It’s thanks to that self-assured rejection to downsize on the outside and inside that the entirety of “In The Heights” works, both as an intimate ode to a tightknit community made up of individuals stuck in an in-between (a visceral state of being that will be deeply familiar to fellow immigrants), and a hard-hitting political statement that has something to say about all the rampant systemic injustices ingrained in a maddeningly white-normative society, from gentrification to casual racism. In unison, Chu’s direction, Miranda’s music and lyrics, and Hudes’ script amplify an idea voiced by Abuela—about asserting one’s dignity in small ways—and memorialize that notion of self-worth by seeing all the details that add up to it. Thankfully, it’s evident that this ambition is shared by the entire cast (all exceptional singers, dancers and performers), Alice Brooks ’ dreamy cinematography, Myron Kerstein ’s snappy editing as well as production designer Nelson Coates and costumer Mitchell Travers , with the duo highlighting the diverse shapes and forms of a unique slice of Manhattan with dizzying imagination.

Survey the proud faces that shout “HEY!” during “Carnaval del Barrio,” another one of the film’s buoyantly inviting songs; hum along, perhaps quietly weep, when silky fabrics spill out of buildings like tears as Vanessa aches for a better future; inspect the lively, alluring moves of the hair parlor ladies as they vibrate to “No Me Diga” and even take notice of Nina’s hair that quickly transforms from straight to beautifully unruly and curly, and you will be that much closer to grasping the kind of character “In The Heights” is out to seize inside a world many choose to deem invisible. A celebration of the idea of home, both self-made and born and carried in one’s soul, “We are here,” this movie affirms with cinematic majesty. What a magnificent sight to behold.

"In the Heights" will be available on HBO Max and in theaters starting June 10.

Tomris Laffly

Tomris Laffly is a freelance film writer and critic based in New York. A member of the New York Film Critics Circle (NYFCC), she regularly contributes to  RogerEbert.com , Variety and Time Out New York, with bylines in Filmmaker Magazine, Film Journal International, Vulture, The Playlist and The Wrap, among other outlets.

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Film credits.

In The Heights (2021)

Rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive references.

143 minutes

Anthony Ramos as Usnavi de la Vega

Melissa Barrera as Vanessa

Corey Hawkins as Benny

Leslie Grace as Nina Rosario

Olga Merediz as Abuela Claudia

Jimmy Smits as Kevin Rosario

Lin-Manuel Miranda as Piragüero

Daphne Rubin-Vega as Daniela

Stephanie Beatriz as Carla

Gregory Diaz IV as Sonny

Dascha Polanco as Cuca

Marc Anthony as Gapo

Writer (based on the musical stage play, book by)

• Quiara Alegría Hudes

Writer (based on the musical stage play, concept by)

• Lin-Manuel Miranda

Cinematographer

• Alice Brooks
• Myron Kerstein

Composer (songs)

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‘In the Heights’ Review: In Dreams Begin Responsibilities

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical comes to the screen as an exuberant and heartfelt party, directed by Jon M. Chu and starring Anthony Ramos.

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‘In the Heights’ | Anatomy of a Scene

Jon m. chu narrates a sequence from his film featuring anthony ramos..

Hey this is Jon M. Chu, the director of “In the Heights.” So this is the amazing Anthony Ramos, who plays Usnavi, the main storyteller in our movie. And he’s just said the streets are made of music. So we had to get all these people to go to the beat. We had this amazing clave beat that was playing and so all the background people had to go to that beat. [LAUGHING] [RECORD SQUEAK] That manhole cover doesn’t actually move. He just did that with his feet and our VFX team created an amazing spinning turntable there. This is a real bodega that we painted that mural on and aged all the ads on there for this. And then this is Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of the show, who’s playing Piragua Guy. And you can see that piragua cart. He often knocked it over and would fall everywhere. And we’d all have to clean it up. It was not easy to maneuver. And here we are in the bodega. This is an amazing set that we built. We actually built the sidewalk outside the door so that we could make transitions. But here we really wanted to show off that map of the Dominican Republic, which is pieces of glass, bottles, it has keys all in there. And because of the set, we can take out the wall. So here we’re behind the wall actually here. All the food is real, so it was starting to smell over time. Actors would steal food and eat treats. By the end, I would say half those shelves were gone, because we’d just grab cookies. “Ooh!” “Abuela, my fridge broke. I got cafe, but no con leche.” “Ay, dios!” I love the set, because it just looks like a real place. It’s not too clean. There’s a messy beauty to it. Olga Meredith, who plays Abuela Claudia, is amazing. And we knew we would not recast her. She had to be in this movie. “—Abuela, she’s not really—” That moment with Anthony looking at the camera, not a lot of actors can really look at us and invite us in, like we’re one of his homies. But he had that amazing ability. “Well, you must take the A train even farther than Harlem—” We had iPad choreography with your fingers. Actually, it took a long time to figure out how would we do choreography with your fingers on your iPad. It’s more difficult than it seems. “—somebody bought Ortega’s, our neighbors started packing up and picking up. And ever since the rents went up. It’s gotten mad expensive, but we live with just enough.” “In the Heights—” The amount of time we had to put the blanket over the camera and not hurt the lens was tricky. I love this. We call this our community chorus, people who are dancers, and people you see throughout the movie. And I love seeing a neighborhood that works hard, takes care of their families, take care of each other, has dreams and otherwise. And that’s our opening for “In the Heights.”

By A.O. Scott

“ In the Heights ” begins with a man — Usnavi, played by Anthony Ramos — telling a story to a group of children. They are gathered on the patio of a bar on a palm-fringed, sun-kissed beach in the Dominican Republic. The bar is called El Sueñito, or the Little Dream, and the name is at once a clue, a spoiler and the key to the themes of this exuberant and heartfelt musical.

A dream can be a fantasy or a goal, an escape or an aspiration, a rejection of the way things are or an affirmation of what could be. “ In the Heights ,” adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Tony-winning Broadway show , embraces all of these meanings. After more than a year of desultory streaming, anemic entertainment and panicky doomscrolling, it’s a dream come true.

The director, Jon M. Chu ( “Crazy Rich Asians” ), draws on the anti-realist traditions of Hollywood song-and-dance spectacle to vault the characters (and the audience) into exalted realms of feeling and magic. Two lovers step off a tenement fire escape and pirouette up and down the walls of the building in a sweet and thrilling defiance of gravity. A public swimming pool turns into a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of kineticism and color. The wigs on a beauty salon shelf bounce along to the beat of a big production number.

At the same time, this multistranded, intergenerational story about family, community and upward mobility is rooted in the real-world soil of hard work and sacrifice. The modest dreams of Usnavi and his neighbors and friends are reflections of a very big dream — the American one, which the film celebrates without irony even as it takes note of certain contradictions.

We are transported from the tropical tranquillity of El Sueñito to the summertime swelter of Washington Heights, a stretch of Upper Manhattan shadowed by the George Washington Bridge and illuminated by Hudson River sunsets. Its streets are a double-poled magnet. In the 20th century, immigrants from the Caribbean and other parts of Latin America — including Usnavi’s father, now dead, and the neighborhood matriarch Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz) — were drawn by the promise of economic opportunity. Some opened small businesses, like the bodega where Usnavi and his cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV) spend their days dispensing café con leche, quarter waters and other staples. Across the street is a livery cab service owned by Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits), who came to New York from Puerto Rico and poured his hopes into his daughter, Nina (Leslie Grace). The apple of his eye and the pride of the neighborhood — “the best of us,” as Kevin says — Nina is a student at Stanford.

She returns home for the summer in the grip of an ambivalence that is as much a fixture of the Heights as open fire hydrants and piragua carts. (Miranda, who originated the role of Usnavi onstage, shows up as a vendor of those syrup-soaked hot-weather treats, a man whose nemesis is the controversial New York character Mister Softee.)

Usnavi remembers his childhood in the Dominican Republic as the best time of his life. For him, that island represents roots, origins, identity — everything that Washington Heights is for Nina. He dreams of finding himself by returning to his father’s homeland. She is expected to reinvent herself in a place that Kevin, who never finished high school, can scarcely imagine. There may be no place like home, but in America home is almost never just one place.

Miranda and Hudes made “In the Heights” long before “Hamilton,” but in some ways the movie version, arriving in the wake of the “Hamilton” juggernaut , works as a sequel. Like Alexander Hamilton, Usnavi is an orphan and an immigrant. His neighborhood bears the name of Hamilton’s commander in chief. And its residents plant their flags — Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, Mexican and more — in the land of the $10 bill. The city may be a paradise where “the streets are made of music,” but it’s also a purgatory of cold winters, deep-rooted bigotry and bureaucratic cruelty.

These complications are both the film’s scaffolding and its subject. Miranda is, at heart, a political romantic and a romantic optimist. Some viewers may wish for sharper-edged explorations of issues like gentrification and immigration policy, and maybe also a critical perspective on family, sexuality and gender. But if Miranda is, in some ways, a revolutionary artist, he is anything but a radical. He believes in the redemptive promise and democratic potential of popular culture — meaning not only commercially packaged music, movies and dance but also streetwear styles, block parties and home-cooked meals — and in the supreme power of love.

Accordingly, “In the Heights” organizes its busy plot around parallel love stories. Usnavi is smitten with Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), whose dream is to move downtown to pursue a career in fashion. (She works in the salon owned by Daniela, who is played by the great Daphne Rubin-Vega.) Nina, meanwhile, is still sweet on Benny (Corey Hawkins), her ex-boyfriend and Kevin’s trusted dispatcher. As the weather gets hotter and a blackout approaches, the two couples sing their way through longing, lust, disappointment and bliss — not always in that order but with an ardent sincerity capable of melting the iciest heart.

Like Usnavi, the movie — bristling with ideas, verbal wit and musical invention — wears its heart on its sleeve. It also reflects his virtues: generosity, decency, hard work, pride. Ramos’s charisma is perfectly suited to the role. His modesty is as winning and genuine as his bravado, and he’s a strong theatrical singer as well as a subtle film actor. It would be unfair to the rest of the wonderful cast — and false to the inclusive, familial spirit that makes “In the Heights” so winning — to say he dominates the screen. He’s the one who keeps the party going, and the reason it’s happening at all.

It’s a great party — replete with fireworks, dance floor blowouts, kisses, tears, loud arguments, more kisses and more tears. Which isn’t the same as a great movie. There are some dead spots in the story, and scenes, including musical numbers, that are adequate when they should be dazzling. Still, in spite of a longish running time I really didn’t want it to end. Chu knows how to show everyone a good time. The nightclub, swimming pool and beauty shop scenes are joyful and welcoming, even if, as cinema, they aren’t especially memorable or original. The dynamic choreography, by Christopher Scott, is ill served by the editing and camera movements, which hack graceful and athletic motion into a hectic collage of faces and limbs.

One notable exception — an emotional high point in the film — accompanies the song “Paciencia y Fe,” a lovely, piercing reminiscence of exile and adaptation, sung by Abuela Claudia. Nearing the end of her life, she recalls her emigration from Cuba as a young girl in the 1940s. There is bitterness in the memories of what followed, alienation and hardship to go along with the patience and faith. As she sings, dancers in flowing linen robes and head-wrappings spin and lunge in vintage subway cars.

The song offers mic-drop confirmation of Miranda’s virtuosity as a composer and songwriter while affirming his particular genius as a cultural historian. The images evoke both Caribbean dance traditions and midcentury choreographic modernism, just as the music layers Latin American idioms onto a sturdy show-tune infrastructure. The synthesis is a revelation partly because it uncovers crosscurrents and influences that have always been there, even if they weren’t always recognized or expressed in quite this way.

And “In the Heights,” which opened on Broadway in 2008 and was supposed to arrive in movie theaters last year, feels as of the moment as a freshly scraped piragua on a broiling July day and as permanent as the girders of the George Washington Bridge. It’s a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams.

In the Heights Rated PG-13. Running time: 2 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and on HBO Max .

An earlier version of this review misstated the role Anthony Ramos played in “Hamilton.” He played John Laurens and Hamilton’s son Philip, not Alexander Hamilton.

How we handle corrections

A.O. Scott is a critic at large and the co-chief film critic. He joined The Times in 2000 and has written for the Book Review and The New York Times Magazine. He is also the author of “Better Living Through Criticism.” More about A.O. Scott

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Ramshackle Dreams Make In the Heights a Believable Fairytale

Last March, In the Heights wound up being the last film I saw in a theater before COVID-19 shut down New York. I had just arrived at a press screening when I learned that our physical office was closing and that everyone would work from home until further notice. This made watching the movie a bittersweet experience. The vision of community, the sweaty intimacy of crowded street corners and apartments and clubs, the revolving door of neighbors and friends drifting through each other’s days like surrogate family, not to mention an enduring, frustrated love for the tousled grandeur of the city itself — all these things, even the very idea of them, felt like they were quickly receding into the past, with little insight into when they might, if ever, return.

Of course, even without a pandemic, In the Heights (now out in theaters and on HBO Max, after a year of delays), directed by Jon M. Chu from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hit musical love letter to the largely Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights, was already suffused with a gentle melancholy — not exactly nostalgia, but a sense of things passing. There’s a fairy-tale retrospection built into the film’s framing device, as our hero, Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), sits at an idyllic beachside bar talking to a group of kids about “a faraway land called Nueva York” and a “barrio called Washington Heights.” (“Say it, so it doesn’t disappear,” he implores them.) His story centers on what would have been his last days in New York, as he prepares to leave behind the bodega he has run for most of his life and return to the Dominican Republic to restore his late father’s beloved bar. The neighborhood is changing, gentrification is encroaching, and Usnavi is tired of slaving away just to make ends meet. Once upon a time, moving to America meant a better life; now, it seems like you must leave to improve your lot.

The bar he hopes to reopen is called “El Sueñito” — “Little Dream” — and the film’s four protagonists all have their distinct little dreams, each revealing a different relationship to this community. Usnavi wants to go back to his family’s homeland, where he believes he spent the best days of his life as a child; Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), the aspiring designer Usnavi not-so-secretly longs for, intends to move downtown to open her own fashion store in the West Village; Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace) has just returned from a tumultuous first year at Stanford determined not to go back but also mortified of disappointing all the family and neighbors who had such high hopes for her; Usnavi’s best friend Benny (Corey Hawkins), who has feelings for Nina Rosario, wants to continue diligently working for the car service owned by her father Kevin (Jimmy Smits), a situation complicated by the fact that Kevin is thinking of selling the business to help pay for his daughter’s tuition.

This quartet of young lovers drives the story, but they’re just part of the expansive tapestry on display. The film’s numbers, drawn from a wide range of musical styles, rarely follow a single emotional through line, instead presenting entire symphonies of character, gesture, and subplot. The movie was shot on location in Washington Heights, lending it an immediacy that makes for a vibrant, occasionally dissonant combination with the outsized aesthetic of a studio musical. Chu simultaneously blends the casual, the lived-in and intimate with a traditional musical’s broad gestures and precise rhythms and dream logic, as the actors flip easily between the naturalistic and the theatrical.

That idea is certainly not new, but it doesn’t always work this well. The film has several show-stoppers, with the best one coming right in the middle, as news that Usnavi’s bodega sold a winning lottery ticket that will pay out $96,000 percolates through the crowd at a giant public pool . Everybody sings, in their own style and cadence, about what they would do with such a sum. Throwaway dance moves, bits of slapstick, glimpses of gritty sincerity are cut against grand, highly coordinated movements. It’s like Busby Berkeley by way of Vittorio De Sica. The musical miniatures within the grander scheme make the individual singers’ hopes and fears palpable, but when the camera pulls out and we see the whole pool rise up for the chorus, the effect is overwhelming, as if the power of a thousand dreams has somehow transformed reality itself.

This sort of informal awkwardness clashing against exacting choreography is the film’s sweet spot. (It’s also where Chu has always thrived, as his lovely entries in the Step Up series demonstrated years ago.) It works during the film’s softer moments, too. Late in the movie, when two of our young lovers dance gently and vertically along the side of an apartment building, the moment startles not for technical reasons — it’s the simplest of effects — but because the dancers are clearly experiencing the wonder of what they’re doing, as if surprised that their emotions have allowed them to defy the laws of gravity. They’re in love, and they’re a little freaked out by how it has literally upended their world. Push too far in either direction — make the dancers too confident, or make them too hesitant — and the scene would lose its charm. Their uncertainty heightens their grace, which in turn heightens their humanity. The same could be said for In the Heights itself, which achieves a ramshackle beauty all its own.

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Screen Rant

In the heights review: a joyful, energetic musical with a moving story.

With an outstanding cast and compelling themes, In the Heights soars, bringing emotional beats together in a celebration of culture and community.

With Dear Evan Hansen and Everybody’s Talking About Jamie upcoming, 2021 may just be the year of the musical and In the Heights , directed by Jon M. Chu ,  ushers in a fabulously strong start to the summer movie experience. The film, based on the Broadway play by Lin-Manuel Miranda (who wrote the music and lyrics) and Quiara Alegría Hudes (who wrote the book and the film’s screenplay), is an enchanting, lively, and magnetic musical adaptation. With an outstanding cast and compelling themes, In the Height s soars, bringing emotional beats together in a celebration of culture and community. 

Set in New York City’s Washington Heights, the story follows Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos), a bodega owner who dreams of returning to the Dominican Republic to fulfill the dreams of his father and is encouraged by his Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), the neighborhood’s beloved grandmother who is always buying lottery tickets in the hopes she will win someday. His best friend Benny (Corey Hawkins) works at the local dispatch company owned by Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits), the father of Nina (Leslie Grace), who has just returned from Stanford and is not looking forward to breaking the news about her decision. Meanwhile, Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) is a budding fashion designer who believes she needs to move downtown to catch her big break, but struggles with finding a place to rent. The musical’s events take place over the course of several days in the midst of a summer heat wave, with each of the characters grappling with the next big steps in their lives and what their decisions mean for their futures.  

Related:  Every Hamilton Actor Returning For In The Heights

In the Heights is a rapturous celebration of the Latinx community. The film’s New York City setting is incredibly well utilized — the streets, the bodega, the public pool, the subway, and the interior rooms are all used in ways that not only elevate the story, but turn Washington Heights into an additional character. This is how cities should be employed in any story and it makes the musical all the better for it, effectively capturing the essence of the location and its diverse population. Each and every scene is also brimming with a contagious spirit, one that will make viewers want to dance along to the songs. From “96,000,” a number that implements all the characters and hundreds of extras dancing in and around the pool, to “Carnaval Del Barrio,” a sizzling neighborhood party starter (and one of the best scenes in the film), the music and lyrics work to tell the story of the characters, their journeys, and the block they call home with zeal. 

The songs and story beats bring laughter and tears, with the film balancing the highs and lows of the characters’ journeys. In the Heights is deeply sentimental, with the warmth and love of the characters enveloping even the most tension-fueled moments. It’s the strength of the characters’ relationships and the deep sense of community that makes this film all the more powerful, with emotional beats that pull at the heart strings and tender romantic sequences that are enchanting and lovely, elevated even more thanks to the actors’ chemistry (this is especially true of Corey Hawkins and Leslie Grace). The musical buzzes with energy, captivating audiences’ senses from the start. It’s visually spectacular as well, with the costume and production designs detailed and colorful. 

In the Heights also touches upon themes of belonging, what home can look like for first and second generation immigrants. With feet planted firmly in Washington Heights, the residents of the block contemplate their dreams beyond their neighborhood while also exploring their dual identities and sense of where they fit in. Some of them are able to hope for a better future, believing that things will start happening for them if they leave the neighborhood behind; others don’t have the privilege to dream at all because they aren’t deemed citizens in a country they have always called home. In the Heights also explores the pressures of generational expectations and how a parent’s dreams can be shifted to their child, which can cause a lot of tension, but is a subject that is incredibly realistic and handled with the right amount of thoughtfulness. 

While the film contends with belonging, it also celebrates bicultural identities with poignancy, heart, warmth, and pride. In the Heights is a beautifully made film and the passionate efforts that have been poured into bringing it to life are on display in every scene. There are a couple of alterations made from the original show to fit more with the flow of the film and it works, effectively enhancing the experience of the musical’s original setup without removing the heart of the story. Musicals are not so easy to adapt to the big screen — some things work in favor of the story while others don’t. However, In the Heights is engrossing, vibrant, with a thoughtful, entertainingly-told story that feels spirited and authentic.

Next:  New In The Heights Clip Showcases Movie Musical's Impressive Cast

In the Heights will release in theaters and on HBO Max June 11. The film is 143 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive references.

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In the heights.

In the Heights

Review by brian eggert june 11, 2021.

If you want a film that reminds you why they’re called motion pictures, In the Heights will do the trick. Adapted from Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Tony-winning Broadway musical, the material breaks free of its origins in splendid fashion. Stage musicals are limited to a few façades and changes of scenery. Everything’s on display simultaneously, and even in the most well-directed productions, gaining focus could prove a challenge. Director John M. Chu, who made Crazy Rich Asians (2018),  reframes the story by shooting in New York City and using hundreds of performers and extras who illuminate the show’s margins. Rather than presenting two-dozen performers on the stage and leaving the audience unsure where to look, Chu isolates performances and dancers, drawing our attention to countless little moments that may have been otherwise lost. His camera is in constant motion, moving around and amongst his actors. Like, say, Singin’ in the Rain (1952), it’s a film that understands a film is not a stage—it’s a film, and so the camera should move with its characters to create a sense of motion through the rhythms of editing and camerawork. 

This all might seem very obvious. But if you watch enough movie musicals, particularly those adapted from Broadway hits, you’ll quickly recognize which ones are stagey and which ones are cinematic. Clint Eastwood must’ve been so enamored with Jersey Boys  on Broadway that he decided to make a statically shot film version in 2014, complete with a camera that practically replicates sitting in the first rows of the August Wilson Theatre. There was movement, sure, but the movement was so restrained that it hardly made the viewer want to move. By contrast, Chu makes us wish movie theaters had a dance floor. In the Heights has an infectious sense of movement, so that tapping your toes or patting your armrest to the hip-hop and salsa tempos hardly feels adequate. The film is alive with Miranda’s music and sharp, reference-laden lyrics, the sort that almost make you regret their speed if only to allow you more time to appreciate the wit of each line. The same goes for choreographer Christopher Scott’s elaborate work with the film’s dancers, who perform in city streets, public pools, and nightclubs. It’s all a little virtuosic, and I haven’t even mentioned the story and themes. 

The screen version finds its central character, Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), in a tropical paradise in the Dominican Republic. He owns a bar called El Sueñito, or little dream , a telling name for what’s to come. Usnavi spins a yarn to a group of children about the fateful days leading up to a blackout one hot summer (not so) long ago. His bar’s name, somewhat on the nose, echoes how the people in Washington Heights arrived in the so-called Land of Opportunity from places such as Puerto Rico and Cuba decades earlier, with a dream of building something better. However, they escaped one trap to be ensnared in another, where capitalism and a profoundly racist culture left them powerless. Today, their once distinct neighborhoods have become gentrified, not to mention homogenized by hipsters and the ultra-rich, and rich hipsters. Thus, the film’s central question becomes one of either “getting out” of the neighborhood or embracing the place you call home. 

If the usual unreality of breaking into song and dance proves too much for some viewers, Chu pushes In the Heights further with effects only contemporary cinema can provide. In one scene, Benny pantomimes as he dances, and his gestures come to life in an array of animated diamonds, golf clubs, and lightsabers. Another scene features CGI banners hanging from Washington Heights buildings in wavy, digital movements. And a strange, out-of-place number called “When the Sun Goes Down” features Benny and Nina singing on their fire escape overlooking the George Washington Bridge at sunset. Then, all at once, they break free of gravity to dance on the side of the building (that, or I missed when they were each bitten by radioactive spiders). While these flourishes signal the production as uniquely cinematic and not a staged musical, they’re distracting in a film that already plays funny games with reality and imagination. The grounded presence of Washington Heights is invigorated into a fantasy landscape by the freeform rules of movie musicals, but somehow ornamenting these moments with special FX felt like too much—even though one should expect such antics from a contemporary musical. 

But these are quibbles. In the Heights is generally a fun and thoughtful film. It was supposed to arrive in theaters last year, but like many major studio projects set for release in 2020, it was delayed due to the pandemic until audiences could catch the show in theaters. And the film demands to be seen in theaters. Only when seated in front of a massive screen, surrounded by darkness and hopefully some other theater patrons, will viewers appreciate the full scale of Chu’s production. Regardless, most will probably catch the film at home—and if that’s you, I would recommend watching with the sound turned up and your distractions minimized (good advice for any at-home viewing). In these conditions, you can appreciate not only the choreography, music, and wealth of diverse voices, but how joyously Chu and cinematographer Alice Brooks move around them. It’s even stunning when the camera comes to a halt for the occasional moment of quiet tenderness, and the stillness brings our emotions into clarity. 

At times In the Heights can seem to gloss over its complex issues of gentrification, discrimination, and immigration with the simplistic, even optimistic solutions of song and dance. Miranda’s music and brilliant lyrics, of course, feel loaded with textuality that invites further consideration. Whatever ideas Miranda, Hudes, and Chu confront, however, they do so with a light touch. After all, despite Miranda’s meta-ness, revisionism, and postmodernism— most famously in Hamilton —he also embraces the classical mode of the musical, complete with a romantic idealism about the potential goodness of the American experience. As mentioned, there’s plenty about the characters’ sometimes grim reality in America, but that’s of tertiary concern. It comes after the film’s status as a musical and its embrace of these ethnic groups, predominantly of Latin American descent, and their community. Whether you relate to the identities represented or not, In the Heights makes you feel like a resident of their neighborhood through the most sharable and universal mediums. As Usnavi says early on, these “streets were made of music.”

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Lin-manuel miranda’s ‘in the heights’: film review.

The musical that put the 'Hamilton' creator on the map gets splashy big-screen treatment from director Jon M. Chu, with an ensemble cast led by Anthony Ramos and Corey Hawkins.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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The title song that opens In the Heights starts quietly with a tentative percussion beat as Anthony Ramos , in a star-making turn as narrator-protagonist Usnavi, eases into the intro’s freestyle rapping while the camera lovingly salutes the slice of Upper Manhattan that provides the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical with its pounding heart. Principal characters and their various domains within the close-knit Latino community are introduced on a warm summer’s day, crawling out of bed, spilling out of their brownstone apartment buildings, hopping on buses and heading to work.

A full ten minutes of this engaging scene-setting unfolds before the frame erupts into an ebullient production number with dancers of all ages, shapes and sizes fanning out all over an entire city block. It’s sheer joy to watch New York shake off its slumber, like an invigorating shower from an open fire hydrant. That alone should make this real-world musical fairy tale a summer crowd-pleaser.

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Release date: Jun 11, 2021

Cast : Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera, Olga Merediz, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Gregory Diaz IV, Stephanie Beatriz, Dascha Polanco, Jimmy Smits, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Patrick Page, Noah Catala, Marc Anthony, Christopher Jackson Director : Jon M. Chu Screenwriter : Quiara Alegria Hudes, based on the musical stage play with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, book by Hudes, concept by Miranda

Even if Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu brings more life to those explosive numbers than to the soapy connective tissue that threads them together, the jubilant spirit of Warners’ big-screen adaptation — held back for a year by the pandemic — is contagious. This is a stirring valentine to a neighborhood and its people that, as the film tells it, stared gentrification in the eye and stood their ground, staying true to their cultural identity. Both the George Washington Bridge and the 168th Street subway station loom large as symbols of escape to the world beyond the barrio. But this is a paean to home — as a cocoon, a state of mind and a legacy for first-generation immigrants.

Miranda wrote the first draft of the show while he was at Wesleyan in the late ‘90s and went on to develop it with director Thomas Kail and playwright Quiara Alegria Hudes. It had a successful off- Broadway debut in 2007, transferring to Broadway the following year and winning four Tony Awards , including best musical and best original score for Miranda.

In that stage production, Miranda played Usnavi, a Washington Heights bodega owner named for the U.S. Navy ship first sighted by his Dominican parents on arrival in America. In the screen version, Miranda ages up into the happily hammy role of the Piragüero, who pushes his cart through the neighborhood selling fruit-flavored shaved-ice desserts. In a pleasing nod to the show’s history, the local driver for his corporatized competition, Mister Softee, is played by Christopher Jackson, an original alumnus of both In the Heights and Miranda’s subsequent monster hit, Hamilton .

The roots of that global blockbuster are readily apparent in this less sophisticated earlier work, in its themes of self-determination and the immigrant contribution, as well as some of its musical motifs. The melodies assigned to the principal women of In the Heights , in particular, often sound like test drives for the Schuyler Sisters’ catchier songs.

But if the material shows Miranda’s formidable creative talents at a more nascent stage, it nonetheless remains clear why the show was a breath of fresh air on predominantly white Broadway, where it ran for almost three years. Just the celebratory representation of striving working-class Latino characters — with one foot in cultural tradition and the other seeking traction in the American Dream — alone was refreshing. Likewise, the musical vernacular, a buoyant blend of Latin American pop, hip-hop, jazz, salsa and merengue with traditional Broadway show tunes. Those same qualities make the film a representational breakthrough for mainstream Hollywood.

The weaknesses of the show were chiefly in its sentimental book, more of a vignette-driven mosaic than a satisfyingly shaped narrative. Hudes hasn’t quite conquered the structural limitations in her adaptation, and Chu perhaps overcompensates by investing heavily in the frequent “fiesta” peaks. Still, a slight imbalance in pacing and energy doesn’t diminish the pleasures of this fizzy entertainment, especially when Ramos is center-screen plying his megawatt charm.

The primary plotline involves Usnavi’s ambition to sell up and buy the beach refreshment kiosk once owned by his father back in the Dominican Republic, the setting of a childhood vacation that still provides his happiest memories. That plan entails some regret, since it means abandoning any chance that his longtime infatuation with Vanessa (Melissa Barrera) will develop into love, even less so since she’s itching to trade the Heights for downtown to break into the fashion industry.

Usnavi was raised since his parents’ early death by Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz, reprising her Tony-nominated Broadway role), the Cuban surrogate grandmother to pretty much the entire community, whom he plans to take with him. He also hopes to coax his smart-mouthed teenage cousin and bodega helper Sonny (scene-stealing livewire Gregory Diaz IV) into joining them. Sonny’s home life with his boozing dad (Marc Anthony) doesn’t provide much incentive to stay, but the cocky kid feels his place is in America, even if his undocumented status poses challenges.

One of Hudes’ most significant updates to the material is the acknowledgment of conservative government moves to overturn DACA, introducing an immigrant rights protest at a climactic point and refashioning the conclusion to centralize Sonny’s future plans. Elsewhere, the screenplay smooths over some of the show’s conflicts, including an outbreak of looting during a city-wide power blackout, and parental objections to the story’s secondary romance due to differences in racial background.

That union is between Benny ( Corey Hawkins ), the Black dispatch worker at cab service Rosario’s, and Nina (Leslie Grace), whose widowed father Kevin ( Jimmy Smits , ageless) owns the struggling business. Nina has dropped out of Stanford at the end of freshman year, feeling like an outsider in that atmosphere of wealth and privilege but using the financial burden as her justification. The weight of community expectations on her shoulders as the one destined to make her mark in the world is nicely expressed in the song “Breathe.” Kevin’s self-reproach over being unable to fund his daughter’s education opportunities causes him to consider drastic measures after already selling off half his storefront.

The discovery that a winning $96,000 lottery ticket was purchased at Usnavi’s store prompts another of Chu’s (literally) splashy set-pieces. That one, with Busby Berkeley-style water ballet elements, steers the entire ensemble to Highbridge Pool for a production number in which all the principals sing of how they’d spend the cash. ( So You Think You Can Dance vet Christopher Scott did the exuberant choreography.) But the owner of the winning ticket is withheld until the end of the movie in a disclosure that few won’t see coming.

There’s an amusing gossip grapevine fed by Vanessa’s boss at the local hairdressing salon, Daniela ( Daphne Rubin-Vega ), in ‘No Me Diga,’ flanked by Carla (Stephanie Beatriz) and Cuca (Dascha Polanco). However, Daniela is also feeling the squeeze of gentrification; buckling under rent increases, she opts to move her salon to the Bronx. But she still summons the pluck to lead a rallying cry in “Carnaval del Barrio,” three days into the power outage when the temperature has soared to 106. It’s fun to see original Rent star Rubin-Vega shimmying back into the spotlight, even if that’s arguably one upbeat party number too many.

Among the movie’s welcome moments of relative calm, the loveliest is Benny and Nina’s duet, “When the Sun Goes Down,” which has them magically dancing up and down apartment block walls and around fire escapes in one of Chu’s more enchanting flourishes. Both performers are appealing, but Hawkins is the revelation, with the sweetest of singing voices and graceful ease in his dance moves. Another highlight comes from Abuela Claudia, the warm soul of the movie in Merediz’s big-hearted performance. Her solo, “Paciencia y Fé (Patience and Faith),” shares her credo while conjuring the Havana of her youth in the New York subway.

Hudes frames the story with some heavy-handed misdirection relating to Usnavi’s ultimate choice, but Ramos — a discovery of the original Hamilton cast — overcomes the script’s flaws with a magnetic performance bursting with personality. He sweeps the audience along even when the action ambles, losing the focus among too many characters.

Vanessa, on the other hand, feels shortchanged, her dream fading in and out. Aside from seeing her salvage textile remnants from a dumpster, we get little evidence of her passion for design until an underwhelming off-the-rack reveal at the end. The conflict in her hesitant romance with Usnavi feels a tad forced, but the actors nonetheless make a winning couple.

It’s a cute joke having a song from Hamilton as the hold music on a phone call at one point, even if it might be a questionable choice to draw attention to a show whose artistry is far superior to this one. But it’s futile to resist the generosity of spirit that powers In the Heights , which extends its adoration to entertainment trailblazers in colorful murals of Latina icons requiring first names only — Chita, Rita, Celia.

The movie glows with an abundance of love for its characters, their milieu and the pride with which they defend their cultural footprint against the encroaching forces of New York development that continually shove the marginalized further into the margins. The resilience with which the characters claim their place in the fabric of city life is exhilarating.

Full credits

Production companies: Warner Bros. Pictures, 5000 Broadway, Barrio Grrrl!, Likely Story, SGS Pictures Productions Distribution: Warner Bros./HBO Max Cast: Anthony Ramos, Corey Hawkins, Leslie Grace, Melissa Barrera, Olga Merediz, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Gregory Diaz IV, Stephanie Beatriz, Dascha Polanco, Jimmy Smits, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Patrick Page, Noah Catala, Marc Anthony, Christopher Jackson Director: Jon M. Chu Screenwriter: Quiara Alegria Hudes, based on the musical stage play with music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, book by Hudes, concept by Miranda Producers: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegria Hudes, Scott Sanders, Anthony Bregman, Mara Jacobs Executive producer: David Nicksay, Kevin McCormick Director of photography: Alice Brooks Production designer: Nelson Coates Costume designer: Mitchell Travers Original songs: Lin-Manuel Miranda Music: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Alex Lacamoire, Bill Sherman Editor: Myron Kerstein Choreographer: Christopher Scott Visual effects supervisor: Mark Russell Casting: Bernard Telsey, Tiffany Little Canfield

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Movie Reviews

'in the heights' is a spirited, socially undistanced, summer crowd pleaser.

Justin Chang

Anthony Ramos and Melissa Barrera play Usnavi and Vanessa in the film In the Heights. Warner Bros. hide caption

Anthony Ramos and Melissa Barrera play Usnavi and Vanessa in the film In the Heights.

In the Heights couldn't be more perfectly timed. For one thing, summer movies don't get much more summery than this one, which takes place during a record-breaking New York heat wave. For another, this vibrant screen adaptation of the Lin-Manuel Miranda stage musical captures something we've largely gone without over the past year: a joyous sense of togetherness.

This is the most socially undistanced movie I've seen in months. The action unfolds in crowded store aisles and gossip-filled beauty salons where everyone knows everyone. The musical numbers, which blend hip-hop, Latin pop, salsa and other styles, frequently spill out into the surrounding neighborhood. The actors become dancers in an electrifying street ballet.

Watch The First Full Trailer For Lin-Manuel Miranda's 'In The Heights' Film

A lot of this is packed into the movie's transporting opening sequence, which brings us into this pan-Latino barrio in Washington Heights. Miranda pops up in a small role as a vendor, selling shaved ice out of a pushcart, but our real guide to this Upper Manhattan neighborhood is Usnavi de la Vega, played by a terrific Anthony Ramos.

Usnavi owns a popular corner bodega that's especially prized for its café con leche. As he raps about the challenges of running his scrappy little business in a place that's rapidly being gentrified, he's joined by a chorus of voices from the neighborhood singing about their own struggles to get by.

As much as he loves Washington Heights and the people who live there, Usnavi longs to return to the beaches of the Dominican Republic where he grew up. He hopes his teenage cousin Sonny, played by Gregory Diaz IV, might come with him, but Sonny, an undocumented immigrant, dreams of becoming a U.S. citizen in a subplot that ties into recent headlines. One of the more poignant insights of In the Heights is that everyone has a different concept of home.

Music Interviews

Anthony ramos pays homage to his past on 'the good & the bad'.

Usnavi has a long-standing crush on Vanessa, played by an excellent Melissa Barrera, who's hoping to move downtown and become a fashion designer. Leslie Grace plays their friend Nina, an academic superstar who's just had a rough year at Stanford, where she feels she doesn't belong. But her father, Kevin — a nice turn by Jimmy Smits — wants Nina to stick with it: If she can't get out of the Heights and succeed, he thinks, what hope is there for anyone else?

Kevin, who immigrated to New York from Puerto Rico decades ago, runs a cab company that's one of the few remaining Latino-owned businesses in the area. As rents go up and people and businesses are forced out, the community gets a shot of excitement when Usnavi finds out that someone bought a winning lottery ticket for a $96,000 jackpot from his bodega.

Lin-Manuel Miranda On Disney, Mixtapes And Why He Won't Try To Top 'Hamilton'

Movie Interviews

'the past isn't done with us,' says 'hamilton' creator lin-manuel miranda.

I saw In the Heights onstage in Los Angeles back in 2010, and while the screenwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes has made some smart tweaks and trims to her original book for the musical, some of the material's basic weaknesses persist here. The various romantic and aspirational subplots are engrossing enough, but feel thinly stretched at more than two hours. Washington Heights looks more vivid and immediate on-screen than it did onstage, but in some ways the simplistic, relentlessly upbeat nature of the story seems all the more glaring.

Still, there's nothing wrong with staying upbeat right now, and the director Jon M. Chu is very much up to the task. Chu previously directed Crazy Rich Asians , and he's good at squeezing resonant ideas about generational conflict and cultural confusion into a deft, crowd-pleasing package. It's worth noting that Chu also made two entries in the Step Up dance-movie franchise, and while I sometimes wish he would slow down the editing and let the musical numbers breathe more, the sheer dynamism of his filmmaking is pretty hard to resist.

In the Heights may not be a great movie, but it's a pretty great moviegoing experience. There are lovely moments here, like when Benny and Nina do a surreal, gravity-defying dance along the side of an apartment building. There are also exhilarating ones, like when the neighborhood, reeling from a heat-wave-triggered blackout, pulls together to throw the mother of all block parties.

And there's a knockout solo from Abuela Claudia, the neighborhood's adopted grandmother, played by Olga Merediz, wonderfully reprising her Tony-nominated role. Claudia's big number is called "Paciencia y Fe," or "Patience and Faith," values she's clung to since she moved from Cuba back in the '40s. She's the living embodiment of this movie's loving and enduring spirit.

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‘In the Heights’ Review: Big Screen Version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Other Broadway Hit Is a Dream Come True

David ehrlich.

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So exuberant and full of life that it would probably convince you the movies were back even if they hadn’t gone anywhere, “ In the Heights ” is the kind of electrifying theatrical experience that people have been waxing nostalgic about ever since the pandemic began — the kind that it almost seemed like we might never get to enjoy again. In that sense, Jon M. Chu ’s super-glossy Broadway adaptation hits with equal parts rapture and relief. Seeing this massive, guileless, heartfelt piece of Hollywood entertainment on the big screen is like coming home after a long year in exile only to find that it’s still there, and maybe even better than you remembered.

This is the story of a New York City block that’s on the brink of disappearing, and it naturally carries an extra charge now that its medium is as delicate as its message. Then again, the threat of commercialized self-erasure has been cooked into Miranda’s anti-gentrification lament since he wrote the first drafts of it as an undergrad at Wesleyan.

A full-throated celebration of the diverse Latinx community that’s been the lifeblood of Washington Heights since the white flight of the 1960s, “In the Heights” paved the way for “Hamilton” by transposing hip-hop, salsa, merengue, and other decidedly non-white sounds into a cadence that would appeal to Broadway audiences. The show is steeped in the customs and characters who defined Miranda’s upper-Manhattan neighborhood, but that local flavor has been filtered through the mind of a musical theater nerd whose heart is evenly split between the likes of Big Pun and Jonathan Larson. That isn’t to suggest “In the Heights” was somehow “not Latino enough” for this Jewish critic from 103rd Street or for anyone else, but rather to say that watching it at the Richard Rodgers Theatre could make you wonder if the show was only being staged for the same tourists who get lost on the way to the Cloisters or whatever in the opening number.

That cynicism might naturally be even more pronounced now that Miranda is an overexposed iconoclast whose baseline sincerity invites a certain amount of cringe, and whose personal ode to an under-represented community has been turned into a major summer blockbuster by a non-Latinx filmmaker whose idea of visibility in “Crazy Rich Asians” was making everyone larger than life. That approach isn’t available to Chu here. This may be another story about ridiculously photogenic people, but they exist at street level. They’re bodega clerks and hairdressers. They’re small-business owners who’ve rooted themselves into the hot concrete of Washington Heights so that their children would be free to bloom elsewhere. They’re Cuban-American grandmothers who’ve adopted every stray kid in the neighborhood, and preach a gospel of patience and faith while they wait for a sign from God that they were right to flee La Vibora for the George Washington Bridge — confirmation that will never come. They’re dreamers in every sense of the word, however small those dreams might be.

Chu doesn’t really know how to do small, so he looks for the spectacle inside the stuff of everyday life. As usual, he finds it through movement. This is a portrait about “a people on the move,” and Chu illustrates that idea as literally as possible, not only by channeling it through Christopher Scott’s propulsive choreography but also by physicalizing the inter-generational rhythms of immigrant identity. Even on its static Broadway set — shaken to life every night and twice on Sunday like a snow globe in a heatwave — “In the Heights” was animated by its fevered insistence that home is something people take with them wherever they go. By cracking that snow globe open and watching it spill onto the actual streets of Washington Heights, Chu has created a film that makes you feel like its characters are dreaming with their eyes open.

Here is a musical so magical and assured that even its missteps seem like good ideas. At the very least, Quiara Alegría Hudes — who also wrote the book for the Broadway show — deserves credit for a screenplay that makes bold choices, emphasizes migratory churn even when it means cutting entire characters, and strives to keep up with the times (risky business in a story about how they’re always changing). This “In the Heights” begins with a labored framing device that falls flat even as it helpfully introduces the promise of home as a place that tends to be found somewhere between where you come from and where you hope to go.

Inheriting Miranda’s role with one of the most charismatic and radiantly likeable performances you’ll ever see on a screen of any kind, Anthony Ramos plays Usnavi as a naturalized storyteller with a twinkle in his eye, and we meet him in his element: Sitting on the Dominican beach of his dreams and telling some precocious kids about the special neighborhood that he kept together from behind the register of the bodega that his dad bequeathed to him. This is a lot to handle at the start of a movie where even the best parts demand a certain tolerance for cheesy musical theater tropes, and it grates every time Chu comes back to it.

As anyone who’s familiar with the show might already suspect, things heat up in a hurry as soon as the action heads north to New York and it lights up on Washington Heights (up at the break of day) for 12 minutes of pure cinematic euphoria that almost make up for the 12 months without it. The streets are literally made of music — down to the manhole covers that spin like turntables — as Usnavi heads to work in a sequence that moves with the grace and purpose of someone weaving a community from the thread of a million separate dreams.

Every character who walks through the doors of that bodega is cast to perfection; maybe there “ain’t no Cassiopeia in Washington Heights,” but a new star is born in this movie virtually every other minute. Even the extras seem like they’re about to become famous (especially the piragua guy). After Ramos, top of the list might have to be Melissa Barrera , whose headstrong, ab-forward Vanessa is such a compelling dream girl that it’s hard to believe Usnavi has room for any other sueñitos in his head. He wants to move back to the Dominican Republic, while she only wants to move downtown and join the fashion industry, but the mileage hardly seems to matter for mutual crushes who are heading in opposite directions.

Wherever Usnavi winds up, he won’t be there alone. His little cousin Sonny (a funny Gregory Diaz IV, boasting an impressive flow) will follow him wherever he goes. If Usnavi stays put in the Heights, he can always kick it with his best friend Benny, a handsome taxi dispatcher whom the golden-throated Corey Hawkins plays with such charm and backbone that the movie hits a new altitude every time he’s on screen. It’s a performance so buoyant that it takes a second to clock what’s strange about the sequence where Benny dances up the side of an apartment building with his boss’ daughter (Leslie Grace shines as homesick Stanford student Nina Rosario, ambivalent about her role as the girl who got out, while Jimmy Smits is the movie’s tortured soul as the dad who cherishes Washington Heights because it allowed him to send his baby somewhere else). The most ecstatic stretches of “In the Heights” don’t merely suspend disbelief; they change the gravity of the world around you.

We also meet gossipy salon workers Daniela (“Rent” icon Daphne Rubin-Vega) and Carla (“Brooklyn 99” favorite Stephanie Beatriz), most notable for their unapologetic plans of moving to the Bronx; gentrification is a massacre not a war, and these ladies are the loudest sign of the color that’s being squeezed out of Usnavi’s neighborhood. For now, the weak heartbeat of the Heights still belongs to “Abuela” Claudia (Olga Merediz, reprising the role she originated on Broadway), whose solo — beginning on a subway car that worms through time from contemporary Manhattan to the Havana of her youth — epitomizes Chu’s emphasis on lives of constant transition.

It’s the most poetically staged number in a movie that prefers to mix the bombast of a Busby Berkeley musical with the wistful fantasy of a daydream, full of “little details that tell the world we are not invisible,” even if these characters are sometimes the only ones who can see them. Almost the entire company comes together for an all-timer of a sequence at the Highbridge Park public pool sequence that splits the difference between those two energies and highlights how people can move when they don’t have to sing live. Some flourishes work better than others — cartoonish illustrations pull focus from the first part of “96,000,” while the massive reams of fabric that drape over the entire neighborhood as Vanessa unspools her dream in “It Won’t Be Long Now” tip from sweet imagination into garish CGI unreality.

Chu hits a lot more often than he misses, and always when it counts most. One early shot finds Usnavi staring out from his bodega while in the reflection on the window in front of him we see dozens of dancers pop and lock together on the street outside; it’s a perfect and unshakeable expression of someone being split between two worlds even as their home fades into the stuff of memory. The songs of “In the Heights” lack the historical staying power that Miranda later brought to “Hamilton” (some of them sound like first drafts for those later hits), but the cast fills them with such an urgent life force that it hardly matters if the Piragua Guy’s song one of the catchiest things here.

Like so many of its characters, the movie has inherited a number of personal choices that it’s powerless to change, and resisting those choices has a way of tightening their grip. Hudes’ clever script rearranges some of the numbers to give the movie a clearer shape than the show ever had, but the energy still flags in a story that naturally does a better job of establishing inner turmoil than it does of resolving it. Despite the nod to “It’s a Wonderful Life,” Usnavi’s epiphanies still depend on the kind of whiplash that only works on stage.

Hudes also nixes some of the more charged material in order to emphasize the tenuous promise that America offers to people on the move. For all of its frustrated romance, “In the Heights” has always been more nuanced and honest about the unsettled nature of the immigrant experience than seems possible for a hit Broadway show, and so it’s unfortunate that Hudes’ most overtly political new thread is woven into the old material with a clumsiness that makes some of its most realistic moments ring false. For all of Chu’s gifts, shooting a believable protest scene isn’t one of them.

“In the Heights” is a time capsule at heart — one that’s every bit as focused on “who lives who dies who tells your story” as the next musical that Miranda wrote — and it would rather stumble over a few awkward moments than sweep anything under the rug. Unlike the neighborhood it loves so much, this movie will never change. It will never be a victim of the urban amnesia that forced Chu’s production design team to dress Washington Heights in subtle period drag. Its characters will always be waiting there for you, even the ones who are desperate to leave it behind.

This vivid and revitalizing work of cultural memory couldn’t be more at home in the movie theaters that it’s willing back to life. It leaves you so grateful that someone kept the lights on and preserved the honey-sweet (and slightly embarrassed) vertigo that sweeps over your whole body when you sit in a dark room and surrender to a good musical. All you have to do is see it for yourself. As Usnavi would say: “C’mon! Let’s go!”

Warner Bros. will release “In the Heights” in theaters on Friday, June 11. It will also be available to stream on HBO Max for 30 days. 

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Lights up on Washington Heights.

Opening weekend for the big-screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s debut Broadway musical “In the Heights” is finally upon us after the COVID-19 pandemic delayed its theatrical release for nearly a year.

According to critics, the “spirited,” “cheerful,” “life-affirming” and “socially undistanced” cinematic marvel is the perfect reason to return to theaters, which went dark across the country for several months because of the public health crisis.

Review: ‘In the Heights’ brings the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical vividly to life

Anthony Ramos leads a terrific ensemble in this vibrant ode to life in a Washington Heights barrio from director Jon M. Chu (‘Crazy Rich Asians’).

May 21, 2021

“To call this movie assertive would be an understatement; to describe it as small would be a lie,” writes Justin Chang for the Los Angeles Times.

“At nearly two-and-a-half hours and with a terrific ensemble of actors singing, rapping, dancing and practically bursting out of the frame, ‘In the Heights’ is a brash and invigorating entertainment, a movie of tender, delicate moments that nonetheless revels unabashedly in its own size and scale.”

Directed by Jon M. Chu , “In the Heights” centers on charismatic bodega owner Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos) living in New York City’s predominantly Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights.

While operating his bustling local business, Usnavi (originated on Broadway by Miranda) uplifts his vibrant community, finds love and dreams of escaping to his native Dominican Republic.

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June 11, 2021

“As a collection of interwoven stories set to the pulsing rhythms of everyday barrio life, this ‘In the Heights’ can feel as dramatically thin and overstretched as its source material admittedly was,” Chang continues in his review.

“But as a musical valentine to a close-knit Latino community, an inspired swirl of hip-hop, Latin pop, salsa and other musical idioms, its pleasures are often glorious, even transporting. It summons — and for the most part sustains — the kind of visual and musical energy that might help give the movies the resurgent jab-in-the-arm summer they’ve been waiting for.”

Written for the screen by Quiara Alegría Hudes — who also penned the book for the stage production — the movie musical features a cast including Leslie Grace, Corey Hawkins, Melissa Barrera and Olga Merediz.

See what others have been saying about the soon-to-be summer blockbuster below.

The Atlantic

“In The Heights presents a distinct and diverse version of Latino culture in the United States,” writes Carlos Aguilar . “Washington Heights is a tapestry of its residents’ homelands: a bit Vega Alta, a bit Santo Domingo, and a mélange of other locations. Miranda and Hudes have captured a beautifully fragmented community that clings to what its members have in common while cognizant that they are not a monolith.”

“‘In The Heights’ slice-of-life portraiture suggests a less ambitious undertaking than Hamilton, but it tells a story as expansive as that of a fledgling nation,” writes Danette Chavez .

“Through both musicals, Miranda demonstrates how ingrained people of color are in this country’s history: Before he reimagined a pivotal chapter in United States history with Black and Latinx actors, the acclaimed multi-hyphenate threw a spotlight on marginalized people’s fight against displacement. At the core of ‘In The Heights,’ on stage or screen, is movement — as migration, as immigration, as dancing, as code-switching, as the shift from friends to lovers. After nearly 13 years, it’s time for audiences to join the parranda.”

But Why Tho?

“There is a lot I want to say about ‘In the Heights.’ I can talk about how it’s the most stunning example of Latinx joy I have ever seen on screen. I can talk about how it takes the very real struggle and elegantly presents [it] to an audience that may not know what it’s like,” writes Kate Sánchez .

“I can talk about how I was Nina, in a place where everyone thought I didn’t belong, and how that fueled my imposter syndrome. I can talk about how the film’s most touching number isn’t one that comes from sadness, but instead, one calling for Latinx folks to raise our flags, to own our identities, and feel joy and strength with it. I can write about all of those things and somehow I would still not be able to capture the power and the beauty of ‘In the Heights.’”

CineMovie TV

“All the actors perform beautifully in their musical numbers. Miranda and Chu bring out the best in all the actors, even those not trained as singers. Actors like Hawkins and Barrera, who are not known for their vocal abilities, shine here with beautiful renditions of their singing voice,” writes Lupe R. Haas .

“Anthony Ramos, of course, is the heart of the movie. The actor is very charismatic and relatable. He holds the movie together even when the story ventures off to other character’s subplots. He tells a story in a riveting fashion that keeps your attention for over two hours.”

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June 3, 2021

“The simplicity of the tale belies the intoxicating nature of the music, from lovely ballads to a showstopping Busby Berkeley-style rendition of ‘96,000’ at the local pool and a beautifully choreographed homage to Fred Astaire,” writes Brian Lowry .

“Throughout, the movie bursts with energy and color, with shrewd casting choices from top to bottom, perhaps especially with Grace (a singer making her movie debut) and Barrera (who co-starred in the Starz series ‘Vida’).”

Entertainment Weekly

“For all its rich tapestry and radiant ingenues, it’s that casual centering of so many marginalized voices that makes the movie feel, in its own way, revolutionary: a Technicolor marvel as heady as Old Hollywood, and as modern as this moment,” writes Leah Greenblatt .

The Hollywood Reporter

“The movie glows with an abundance of love for its characters, their milieu and the pride with which they defend their cultural footprint against the encroaching forces of New York development that continually shove the marginalized further into the margins,” writes David Rooney . “The resilience with which the characters claim their place in the fabric of city life is exhilarating.”

“Even on its static Broadway set — shaken to life every night and twice on Sunday like a snow globe in a heatwave — ‘In the Heights’ was animated by its fevered insistence that home is something people take with them wherever they go,” writes David Ehrlich .

“By cracking that snow globe open and watching it spill onto the actual streets of Washington Heights, Chu has created a film that makes you feel like its characters are dreaming with their eyes open. Here is a musical so magical and assured that even its missteps seem like good ideas.”

Latino Entertainment Journalists Assn.

“[Chu’s] direction of ‘In The Heights’ may have been scoffed at when announced but after seeing the film, it is hard to imagine any other director doing it justice,” writes Toni Gonzales .

“Chu is able to capture the culture and with a justified reverence, make it sparkle and shine. Not an easy task to do, no doubt. But Chu does it brilliantly in his choice of choreographed dance scenes, shot selections, and — as the film says — with patience and faith.”

New York Times

“Like Usnavi, the movie — bristling with ideas, verbal wit and musical invention — wears its heart on its sleeve,” writes A.O. Scott . “It also reflects his virtues: generosity, decency, hard work, pride. Ramos’s charisma is perfectly suited to the role.

“His modesty is as winning and genuine as his bravado, and he’s a strong theatrical singer as well as a subtle film actor. It would be unfair to the rest of the wonderful cast — and false to the inclusive, familial spirit that makes ‘In the Heights’ so winning — to say he dominates the screen. He’s the one who keeps the party going, and the reason it’s happening at all.”

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Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes explain the reasons behind the musical’s biggest tweaks from the stage to the screen.

June 10, 2021

“True, ‘In The Heights’ is a traditional movie musical, right down to its lavish Busby Berkeley-style production numbers. That doesn’t diminish its significance,” writes Raul A. Reyes . “For Latino audiences, it’s a chance to take pride in our culture. And for everyone else, it’s a reminder that Latinos live, work and pursue their dreams, just like other Americans.

“With its Spanglish, salsa dancing, and infectious beats, ‘In The Heights’ presents the Latino experience with authenticity and affection. It is a celebration of Latino heritage that America needs right now.”

“Seeing Dominicans and Puerto Ricans take to the streets may not be as novel now as it was when ‘In the Heights’ hit Broadway, but it’s no less invigorating on the big screen,” writes Peter Debruge . “Miranda’s terrific songs speak for themselves, leaving Chu to orchestrate the carnaval del barrio that does justice to everyday people of color. Holler!”

“The movie was shot on location in Washington Heights, lending it an immediacy that makes for a vibrant, occasionally dissonant combination with the outsized aesthetic of a studio musical,” writes Bilge Ebiri .

“Chu simultaneously blends the casual, the lived-in and intimate with a traditional musical’s broad gestures and precise rhythms and dream logic, as the actors flip easily between the naturalistic and the theatrical.”

Washington Post

“Melding rap, salsa, merengue and Latin pop, and name-checking the specific countries and cultures too often flattened out with the over-generalizing term ‘Latino,’ the big-screen version of ‘In the Heights’ preserves what might be Miranda’s most revolutionary accomplishment: reframing American musical theater within an entirely familiar — yet specific, authentic and invigorating — vernacular,” writes Ann Hornaday .

We Live Entertainment

“From start to finish, ‘In the Heights’ is a musical odyssey,” writes Adriana Gomez-Weston .

“The film opens with the upbeat title song, ‘In the Heights,’ then hits an early emotional note with ‘Breathe.’ Some other showstoppers are ‘96,000’ and ‘Carnaval del Barrio.’ Overall, ‘In the Heights’ doesn’t have a song or moment that isn’t enjoyable. Once again, combined with the writing talents of Quiara Alegría Hudes, Lin-Manuel Miranda exhibits his amazing ability to intertwine words and sound to create something beautiful.”

“With ‘In the Heights,’ Chu delivers the Latino equivalent of his previous box office smash ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ and knocks it out of the park,” writes Monica Castillo .

“Like ‘Crazy Rich Asians,’ not everyone is going to feel represented when they watch ‘In the Heights.’ That’s an impossible task for any movie. Yet ‘In the Heights’ can represent many things for many different viewers. It can be a story about ambitious, hard-working people chasing their dreams. It can be a reflection on the immigrant experience and the struggle to find where you belong. It can also be a tribute to our parents’ sacrifices.”

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In the Heights (2021) Review

In the h eights (2021) director: jon m. chu screenwriters: quiara alegría hudes, lin-manuel miranda starring: anthony ramos, melissa berrera, leslie grace, corey hawkins, olga merediz, jimmy smits.

Based on the hit Broadway musical from acclaimed writer Lin-Manuel Miranda, In the Heights tells the story of a New York based Latin American community, Washington Heights, in the build-up to a blackout that changes their lives in ways they could never have predicted. Offering bright colours, stunning visuals and a stellar soundtrack, In the Heights is a force to be reckoned with and will likely be one of the biggest films of the summer.  

Anthony Ramos ( A Star is Born ) leads the cast as Usnavi, a New Yorker originally from the Dominican Republic and with dreams of one day returning to reopen his late father’s beach bar. Ramos delivers the role with gumption and heart in a way that feels fresh and innovative. After the roaring success of Miranda’s musical sensation, “Hamilton” (2019), which also starred Ramos as John Laurens/Phillip Schyler, the two working together for In the Heights confirms that their artistic partnership is a match made in heaven. Ramos’ performance is profoundly watchable, thanks both to his triple threat talent and the assistance of his supporting cast.

Usnavi is surrounded by friends and family, but no one is more important to him than his beloved Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz). Claudia is Usnavi’s non-related grandmother who raised him after he lost both his parents. Thanks to his upbringing in Claudia’s kind care, Usnavi also reflects the caring older brother figure to Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), his scrappy young cousin who dreams of becoming a college graduate one day.

Nina (Leslie Grace) makes her grand return back to Washington Heights after her first semester at college on the west coast to try and find the courage to admit to her father, local businessman Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits), that due to racial issues she wants to drop out. As she walks down the streets she grew up on, she bumps into her ex-boyfriend and close friend Benny (Corey Hawkins) who works for Kevin. The two rekindle their teenage love for each other in a blossoming love story which compliments the rest of the film. This truly is an ensemble piece.

Usnavi’s dream, and the one that drives the intent of the entire story, is to move Claudia and Sonny back to the Dominican Republic with him and live a life of bliss in the sunshine. But as the summer gets hotter and hotter in New York and the city plunges into darkness due to a blackout, things don’t quite go to plan for Usnavi and his family.  

Along with being colourful and somewhat otherworldly, as a lot of musicals often are,  In the Heights successfully educates us on the struggles of immigrants in the US, a subject that is very close to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s heart. In the Heights specifically expresses the daily struggle for Latinos. Vanessa (Berrera), Usnavi’s love interest, has the ambition to become a fashion designer in Manhattan, and whilst working at a hair salon she manages to save enough money to buy her own apartment, but due to not having the right signatures on her papers she is rejected. These moments don’t take away from the brilliance of the musical but help to emphasise the importance of telling stories of this nature.  

Director Jon M. Chu echoes the success of his huge summer hit Crazy Rich Asians (2018) by filling the screen with his creative filmmaking skills and ensuring that for all the serious messaging, the film remains uplifting.  In the Heights is jam-packed with powerful performances and fuelled by huge ensemble dance numbers all to the sound of Miranda’s addictive soundtrack; it truly is the uplifting, heartfelt, feel-good film that the world needs.

As we enter into what is likely to be a musical-fuelled summer of cinema, In the Heights has set the bar incredibly high for the likes of Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story , West End hit Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Broadway favourite Dear Evan Hansen .

In the Heights is likely to be the summer movie of 2021.  

Recommended for you: Are Musicals Cinema’s Next Big Trend?

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In the Heights Review

One of the best films of 2021..

This is an advance review of In the Heights, which opens in theaters and HBO Max on June 11.

A film version of In the Heights has been in the works since 2008 when the show debuted on Broadway. A number of stars had to align before it came to fruition as one of the new movies of summer 2021. Creator Lin-Manuel Miranda had to find success with Hamilton, his 2015 Broadway smash, and director Jon M. Chu had to helm the cultural sensation Crazy Rich Asians, which, while lavish and excessive, is ultimately about belonging. The In the Heights movie lives in the shadow of both these works in the way it adapts Miranda’s show. The result is a pure distillation of what he set out to achieve, updated in ways that not only work for a modern retelling but often work better than the original text. It’s also one of the liveliest and most moving films you’re likely to see this year.

The story follows Usnavi de la Vega (Hamilton’s Anthony Ramos), a bodega owner in Washington Heights with big dreams of reopening his father’s bar in the Dominican Republic, but it really follows an ensemble of friends, family, and lovers living through what feels like the last days of a neighborhood being steadily lost to gentrification. To call New York City “a character” is a well-worn cliché, but it’s a truism that bursts to life in Chu’s film, not simply through shots of streets and landmarks, but through the way each corner and sidewalk brims with life, love, and culture.

Usnavi runs his corner store with his cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), a teenage activist, and the rest of the cast is largely introduced as they stop in for a cup of coffee. There’s Usnavi’s friend Benny (Corey Hawkins), an upbeat taxi dispatcher, Benny’s diligent boss Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits), and Rosario’s daughter Nina (Leslie Grace), who’s home for the summer after her first year away at Berkeley. Then there’s Usnavi’s crush Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who’s on the verge of moving downtown to follow her fashion designer dreams, and there are a whole host of neighborhood gossips who work at the local nail salon (Stephanie Beatriz, Dasha Polanco, Daphne Rubin-Vega). There’s also a fun minor role played by Miranda himself, and to bind them all together, there’s the local matriarch Claudia (Olga Merediz), who practically raised the entire neighborhood, and whom they all lovingly call Abuela.

Abuela Claudia, an elderly Cuban immigrant, often speaks of dignity in the face of adversity and the ways people can leave their mark and be remembered. Her words now feel more vital to these characters than ever before. Their neighborhood — made up of Dominican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, and a number of other Latin American cultures — faces the prospect of permanent change, as residents and businesses are being priced out.

While the casting has been criticized for colorism — which Miranda and screenwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes have acknowledged — the film attempts to frame its tapestry as multicultural, and its perspective as multigenerational. The characters are all either immigrants, first-generation Americans, or that in-between generation that immigrated when they were young (Usnavi’s family came over from the Dominican Republic when he was eight, while Sonny was still in diapers). Washington Heights is their home, but the film takes aim at the complicated question of what home even means when change is the only constant. Usnavi remains torn between New York and his father’s home in the Dominican Republic, the first home he ever knew. Vanessa wants to move to a new neighborhood where she might be more successful, but her heart belongs to the Heights. Nina has moved even further away, to California, though she might want to drop out and return home despite shouldering the expectations of her community. The film also adds a brand-new element that didn’t exist in the show, a subplot that hits like a freight train, where one of the characters is revealed to be an undocumented immigrant. They may not have the choice of deciding what home they belong to.

These questions of belonging permeate every scene, from the subtle to the operatic, and the film wraps its story in a framing device also invented for the screen. Usnavi, years later and sporting his most Miranda-esque goatee (Miranda played the role on Broadway), narrates the film’s events to a group of children on a tropical beach. It feels like an element influenced by Hamilton, which frames its story of America’s founders as history told (and wrestled with) in the present. Here, it makes the film’s narrative wistful and bittersweet.

Right from its opening Spanglish number — the half-sung, half-rapped title track “In the Heights” — Chu, cinematographer Alice Brooks, and choreographer Christopher Scott make it clear how they plan to tell this story. It starts out restrained, waiting to burst into all-out mayhem as the music builds. The depiction of these characters and the spaces they occupy is distinctly intimate, as the camera peeks at them in the crowded corners of the bodega, often through glass fridge doors or from between messy shelves. It turns the stage’s two-dimensional backdrops into an inviting three-dimensional world, and it establishes the city’s texture before letting its streets be engulfed by dance. The first time a crowd gathers to move in unison, they’re reflected in a window, out of focus and in the distance. At 2 hours and 23 minutes in length, the film doesn’t want to tip its hand too soon. It doesn’t need to. Instead, the opening song introduces the neighborhood in fragments, through an energetic montage of people from all walks of life heading out to start their day. The film even treats the sounds of the city as music, with honking vehicles and the spritzing of sidewalk water hoses layered into the soundtrack.

Chu’s approach is multifaceted. Depending on the scene or song, the film grounds its bombast in naturalism — the actors, though they sing their hearts out, measure their performances for the camera rather than the back row of an auditorium — but as it gets deeper into its runtime, it introduces playful elements of magical realism, of frames seemingly graffitied by hand, and of dreamlike numbers that combine stage lighting with memories of the city’s past. It runs the gamut, but it rarely loses focus of its story and characters.

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There is, however, an unfortunate downside to this initial fragmented approach, which seems designed to delay gratification. The first time the film feels big, the way you expect a musical to feel is during “96,000,” in which the neighborhood gathers at a local pool. The song comes to life in a synchronized display in and around the water, but the film hasn’t yet managed to shed its penchant for quick-cuts and zippy movements; the result is haphazard, and it feels less like a story told through dance, and more like the random shot selections of a modern pop music video, where the order doesn’t matter, and the visual language has little to say. This fragmentation continues a little while longer, carrying over to a flirtatious number between Benny and Nina, resulting in a stretch of the film that drags as it approaches the 1-hour mark.

However — and this is a pretty big “however” — this brief dip in visual and narrative energy barely matters moving forward. As the threat of a blackout looms and the characters prepare to confront each other over things left unsaid, the film settles into a rhythm, both in its more intimate moments (often non-musical ones, shared over delectably photographed food) and in its more vibrant, energetic dance scenes, one of which unfolds in a scintillating nightclub.

The film’s biggest aesthetic question is how to frame people. It does this quite deftly throughout when it comes to individuals, whose stories it punctuates through close-ups. This is helped immensely by the fact that ostensible leads Ramos and Barrera are able to balance huge bursts of musical emotion with moments of restraint, culminating in a spellbinding single-take musical sequence between the two of them. The film is a rousing success in this regard, though it’s hardly a surprise; Hollywood, after all, is the realm of the individual, most often telling stories of people who rise above.

However, In the Heights is not an individualistic story. It’s one of found family and community, and one that needs its extras and dancers to feel like more than just a backdrop. The film occasionally falters at this — for instance, a candlelight vigil, which arrives at a key moment and leaves just as quickly, lacks the emotional resonance of the more personal, individual story playing out simultaneously. But the film soon finds itself in this regard, culminating in the show-stopping celebratory number “Carnaval del Barrio,” which goes against most musical instincts and places a large crowd of characters in a cramped setting, allowing their joie de vivre to feel defiant in the face of tragedy. The scene is downright overwhelming.

At its loudest, In the Heights explodes with uncontainable energy. At its quietest, it becomes a reflection on memory, and the connections that make up a culture, a story, and a history; “Little details,” Abuela Claudia says, “that tell the world we are not invisible.” But there are some moments where the film does both these things at once, as it fills the screen with small acts of heroism, and with people dancing and dreaming in darkness. Above all, it does what a great musical should do. It makes you feel alive.

Voices shake and voices bellow in this film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway hit. Set in a steadily gentrifying Manhattan neighborhood, In the Heights moves smoothly between cinematic realism and the magic of the stage, in a defiant musical about what it means to belong, and what it means to be remembered. It is one of the most moving and joyful films this year.

In This Article

More Reviews by Siddhant Adlakha

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'In the Heights' is a must-see summer blockbuster that celebrates love, life and community, critics say

• The film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony Award-winning musical "In the Heights" currently holds at 97% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 130 reviews and arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on Thursday.
• Critics have praised Jon Chu's direction and Quiara Alegria Hudes screenplay adaptation of the story she helped Miranda present on stage.
• Anthony Ramos has been lauded for his breakout performance as Usnavi and reviewers delighted in the film's bright colors and flashy dance numbers.

In this article

"In the Heights" is a celebration of love, life and community, critics say.

The film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda's Tony Award-winning musical currently holds at 97% "Fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes from 130 reviews and arrives in theaters and on HBO Max on Thursday.

Directed by Jon M. Chu ("Crazy Rich Asians"), "In the Heights" explores the lives of the inhabitants of the Hispanic community of Manhattan's Washington Heights. The story is centered around bodega owner Usnavi, who dreams of leaving New York City and opening a bar in his home country, the Dominican Republic.

Usnavi has a crush on Vanessa, who works at the local beauty salon and dreams of moving downtown to become a fashion designer. Nina and Benny are the other central couple in the musical. Benny is a dispatcher for a cab company owned by Nina's father, but dreams of starting his own business.

Nina has just returned to the city after a year at Stanford University, but she doesn't want her father to know that she has dropped out because he has been struggling to scrounge together money to send her to the prestigious school. She is also the only one in her family to go to college.

Woven within these love stories are other members of the community who are dealing with their own troubles, including landlords and realtors who are causing rents in the area to spike. There's also heatwave and a lottery ticket worth $96,000.

Critics have praised Chu's direction and Quiara Alegria Hudes' screenplay adaptation of the story she helped Miranda present on stage. Anthony Ramos has been lauded for his breakout performance as Usnavi and reviewers delighted in the film's bright colors and flashy dance numbers.

"To quote 'In the Heights' itself, the streets are made of music in the first genuinely cheerful, splashy, exuberantly life-affirming movie of the summer," Ann Hornaday wrote in her review of the film for The Washington Post.

Here's what critics thought of "In the Heights" ahead of its Thursday debut.

A.O. Scott, The New York Times

A.O. Scott of the The New York Times, praised Chu's direction of the film, particularly, the extravagant musical numbers. Chu is no stranger to integrating dance into his storytelling. He previously directed two films in the "Step Up" franchise. He has also been tapped to handle the upcoming adaptation of the musical "Wicked."

Scott, like other reviewers, also shined a spotlight on Ramos.

"Ramos's charisma is perfectly suited to the role," he wrote. "His modesty is as winning and genuine as his bravado, and he's a strong theatrical singer as well as a subtle film actor."

Ramos portrayed Usnavi's cousin Sonny in the stage musical and portrayed John Laurens and Philip Hamilton as part of the original cast of Miranda's other Tony Award-winning musical "Hamilton."

"'In the Heights,' which opened on Broadway in 2008 and was supposed to arrive in movie theaters last year, feels as of the moment as a freshly scraped piragua on a broiling July day and as permanent as the girders of the George Washington Bridge," Scott wrote. "It's a piece of mainstream American entertainment in the best sense — an assertion of impatience and faith, a celebration of communal ties and individual gumption, a testimony to the power of art to turn struggles into the stuff of dreams."

Read the full review from The New York Times.

Clarisse Loughrey, Independent

"Sometimes a film will come along that feels perfectly of the moment – and not because of any superficial ties to current events," Clarisse Loughrey wrote in her review of the film for Independent. "The themes that pulsate through 'In the Heights' – culture, identity, community, gentrification, and the rights of undocumented immigrants – are as central to the conversation now as they were when Lin-Manuel Miranda first debuted his stage musical in 2005."

"But Jon M Chu's full-throated, dizzyingly soulful adaptation arrives in cinemas after a year-long delay, into a world still trying to crawl out from under the shadows of a devastating pandemic. In that sense, it's a gift."

Loughrey said the film is very conscious of how tethered the musical is to tradition and to the New York community of Washington Heights. Chu tips his hat to the aquamusicals of Esther Williams and the balletic West Side Story, while respecting the cultural history of the neighborhood. During "Carnaval del Barrio," a tapestry of flags flies high above the crowds, including those from the Dominican Republic, Brazil, Puerto Rico.

"'In the Heights' is a musical triumph, unafraid to lift its voice up to the sky," she wrote.

Read the full review from Independent.

Rafael Motamayor, Observer

"Film adaptations of stage musicals walk a tricky line of having to both condense the story into the length of a feature, while also translating a stage production into a cinematic experience," wrote Rafael Motamayor in his review of the film. "Many get lost in the grand spectacle and forget to actually adapt the text, but that's not the case with 'In the Heights,' a film that doubles down on the commentary from the original amid all the catchy and breathtaking musical numbers to create the first truly must-see cinematic experience of the summer."

Motamayor noted that Chu and Hudes dive deep into the play's themes about dreams, but also contextualize some of the characters motivations and their struggles with what it means to be part of the Latinx community and the pressure of inheriting your parent's hopes and dreams in a way that was not explored in the stage production.

He said there are moments when the social commentary of the film can come off as "really corny" and there are a few subplots that feel shoehorned into the narrative without nuance, ultimately distracting from the main story.

"Make no mistake, this is a musical turned into a blockbuster, as Chu treats the wide shots of the dozens of background dancers with the same eye you could see Christopher Nolan apply to 'Tenet,' or the Russo brothers apply to 'Endgame,' he wrote. "There is a feeling of melancholia beneath the upbeat lyrics and the relentless optimism of the characters that comes to the surface at several points in the film, a recognition that things fade, neighborhoods change and people leave, but we might as well throw a huge party before that happens. 'In the Heights' is that party, and we are just lucky to be invited."

Read the full review from Observer.

Monica Castillo, The Wrap

Mixed in with Chu's kinetic dance numbers is "Paciencia y Fe," a ballad sung by Abuela Claudia, an elderly woman who lives in the neighborhood and treats everyone as family.

The "entrancing" dance number contains contemporary ballet and tells the story of Claudia's mother leaving Havana for New York.

"Shot in what looks like the old trains and platforms of the New York Transit Museum, the musical shifts in tone during 'Paciencia y Fe,' taking the audience back in time to revisit painful memories of her struggle to survive in America and the peace of finally feeling at home again," Monica Castillo wrote in her review of the film for The Wrap.

The 'Paciencia y Fe' sequence was praised by many critics for showing the tension many Hispanic people feel as they adapt to living in America, a place where anything is supposed to be possible.

Castillo noted that "In the Heights" is a rarity in Hollywood. Its Latino characters "live normal lives, outside of gang or narco violence and outside of stereotypes."

"How rarely do we see ourselves just hold down a job and nurture our ambitions; in most movies, do we even have enough lines of dialogue to have ambitions?" she wrote.

The film showcases the importance of inclusivity and diversity not only in our neighborhoods but in the entertainment industry.

"With 'In the Heights,' Chu delivers the Latino equivalent of his previous box office smash 'Crazy Rich Asians' and knocks it out of the park," she wrote.

Read the full review from The Wrap.

Disclosure:  Comcast  is the parent company of NBCUniversal and CNBC. NBCUniversal owns Rotten Tomatoes.

Comment on this text

'In the Heights' Review and Summary

Pop culture.

May 18, 2022

By Anjola Oshoko

I love musicals. I absolutely love them, especially the ones worked on by Lin Manuel Miranda. With musicals like Hamilton and Moana under his belt, I just knew that ‘In The Heights’ would not disappoint. It was an explosion of bright colours, music, culture and a loving community.

A brief summary

The 2021 film follows Usnavi, the bodega owner, and his dream to fly back to the Dominican Republic and rebuild his father’s business. Every day he’s saving with his dream in mind, but until then he takes care of the old Cuban lady who mothers the whole neighbourhood and pines after Vanessa, the aspiring fashion designer.

His best friend, Benny, dreams of a life as a wealthy businessman, while Benny’s ex-girlfriend, Nina, a college student, struggles with the weight of the neighbourhood’s expectations, especially her father. The musical looks at issues present in our reality in the lives of the Latin and Caribbean population of Washington Heights, touching on racism, immigration, gentrification and more.

‘In the Heights’ pulls you in by telling a story full of heart, wrapped in a colourful musical that breathes life into the most hopeless souls. I’m exaggerating, but you get the point. Here are my main takeaways:

live in the present

Usnavi often says throughout the movie that the days in the Dominican Republic with his father were the ‘best days of his life.' It’s easy to look back at our childhood with a rose-tinted glass and wish we were back in those carefree times. But it’s important not to dwell on the past or even focus on the future; we should live in the present and aim to make each day the best day of our life. Think about what made your childhood so much fun and try and recreate something similar in your life today. Childhood fun doesn’t have to end just because you’ve grown up; listen to the inner child in you.

You are not powerless

During the blackout, the residents of Washington Heights felt powerless, both literally and figuratively. I think sometimes we too look at our lives and feel powerless, and while that may very well be the case, we still have power over ourselves and how we react in the face of our struggles. Usnavi said it best, “Maybe we’re powerless…How do you want to face it?” How do you want to face your struggles?

You’re already struggling, so why make it worse for yourself with an attitude of ‘there’s nothing you can do’. And if you can’t fight for yourself, seek help from your loved ones or a professional who can help you help yourself; there’s always strength in numbers and you’re never alone.

Keep dreaming

We live in a world that tells you that you have one path to go down with no other options. From school to university to a job to marriage, then death. It’s even worse when you’re part of a minority group, facing people and systems who are always trying to put a ceiling on your potential.

But you do have options, your dreams don’t have to be just dreams. Out there, there are opportunities waiting for you, you just have to find them.

We live in a made-up world, a lot of our life is socially constructed. We create realities based on the shared assumptions of the culture we partake in. If you’ve been constantly surrounded by people who think you must go to university to succeed, you may feel like you’re trapped and unable to live your dream of travelling while young, for example.

But you don’t have to live with that reality—you can create your own; there are resources out there that can help you live your dream. The sky is the limit.

Keeping it short and sweet

To conclude, go watch ‘In The Heights’. I’d personally rate it ten out of ten. It’s heart-warming.

It’s fun. It’s full of love, community, and culture. As I’ve demonstrated, there are a lot of life lessons (and a few TikTok sounds too!) that everyone can enjoy.

Think this article is a must-read? Share it! 🤳💬

Anjola Oshoko 10k+ pageviews

Anjola Oshoko is a marketing student at Birmingham City University. She is a curious individual who is constantly looking for answers to the many questions that run through her mind. You can find her with her nose deep in a book with music providing a soundtrack to her life. And when she isn't reading, she's either with friends or satisfying her curiosities.

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In the Heights Knows the Second-Generation American’s Dilemma

In the new musical, restless young adults are torn between a beloved neighborhood and dreams of escape. But Abuela Claudia, the community’s matriarch, suggests a different way of thinking.

This article contains spoilers for In the Heights.

In The Heights , the director Jon M. Chu’s Hollywood adaptation of the groundbreaking Broadway musical, is ostensibly a tale about the aspirational young. Its focus stays mostly on some dreamers (and a “Dreamer”) living in the Upper Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights. They form an ensemble cast of working-class Latino characters—immigrants and American-born—chasing far-fetched but not entirely implausible sueñitos , or “little dreams.”

There’s Nina (played by Leslie Grace), a student back from Stanford University who is afraid of betraying her values; the businesswoman Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega), who has been priced out of her storefront; Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), a fashion visionary trying and failing to lease a downtown apartment. Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), the entrepreneurial 20-something owner of a corner bodega eager to return to his childhood home in the Dominican Republic, narrates their triumphs and tribulations.

But one character who’s key to understanding In The Heights is not a young adult with bold plans: Abuela Claudia is the community matriarch and emotional lighthouse of the film. She is portrayed by Olga Merediz, the same remarkable Cuban American actor who played the role in the Broadway version of the musical, created by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes. Her singing is potent and sorrowful, with a hint of desperation in every word; her movements are tender. Abuela means “grandma,” although Abuela Claudia is no one’s relative by blood. Instead, she is the cheerleader and caretaker for everyone in the film’s vivid barrio.

Read: Hollywood’s new crown prince of musicals

And the neighborhood’s strivers need Abuela Claudia’s guidance, because a contradiction plagues them. They foster a fierce yearning for things to stay the same. They want the local piragüero to keep doing his rounds, the beauty-salon ladies to remain gossip savants, and the bodega coffee to stay sweet; they want the reliable fixtures that make a home. Yet they also have their life plans. They want to evolve, to become fashion designers or lauded college graduates, while still holding on to their multicultural identity. They want to escape.

The classic peril of assimilation in America is that a perceived greater belonging demands a partial loss of self. What In the Heights endearingly suggests, through Abuela Claudia, is that you can become who you want to be by being who you already are.

In recent years, grandmothers have been prominent dramatic engines for stories centered on migrant families. In Lulu Wang’s The Farewell and Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari , which earned the seasoned South Korean star Youn Yuh-jung an Academy Award this year, the grandmothers’ charming personalities veer between unabashed impertinence and hard-earned wisdom.

In films like these, grandparents personify an American-raised child’s connection to their heritage outside the U.S.; they are a bridge to languages, religious customs, and culinary traditions left behind. Abuela Claudia has no relatives, but she serves a similar purpose, seemingly for an entire neighborhood. As an immigrant herself, she draws on her personal struggles to console and encourage. She understands alienation.

During In The Heights ’ stirring, ethereal number “Paciencia y Fe” (“Patience and Faith”), we find out that, when Abuela Claudia was a kid, her mother took her from La Vibora—“the Washington Heights of Havana” as she describes it—to the harsh grit of Nueva York.

She sings of her journey, of the pressure to learn English, of missing the heat of the Caribbean in the immobilizing cold of the Northeast, and of her mother cleaning houses to support her. Her experience is far from singular among immigrants. Yet the memories she paints are newly validated by their precise articulation in song.

As in traditional Hollywood musicals, lyrics and choreography become a magnifying glass that translates characters’ innermost thoughts into visible, exuberant spectacle. In Chu’s film, dashes of magical realism occasionally even liberate the story from the physical world.

“Paciencia y Fe” unfurls in a liminal realm between life and death that takes the form of an underground subway station. The viewer is transported from mid-19th-century Havana to modern-day New York City inside the same train cars. We are given access to the turmoil in Abuela Claudia’s mind as she grapples with pain, regret, and remnants of hope.

Read: Can a film be a love letter to a country?

Her candid recollections are at once a heartrending prayer and a protest. With this number, the parallels between Abuela Claudia and the film’s younger characters become clear. The latter’s pursuit of socioeconomic advancement, the film suggests, sprouted from the older generation’s. Abuela Claudia and her mother sought a similar chance to improve their circumstances, but in the far less inclusive society of decades past.

Still, underlying Abuela Claudia’s motto, “ Paciencia y fe ,” is a bittersweet resignation. She has carried on, storm after storm, holding on to a divine optimism contained in the infallible combination of patience and faith. But despite her conviction that miracles come to those who wait, when we learn that hers is the winning lottery ticket that caused an uproar earlier in the film—the song “96,000” is about everyone in the Heights who sees winning as a fast track to their endgame—we understand that Abuela Claudia doesn’t know what to do when her fantasy materializes.

Over time, Abuela Claudia has turned her sueñito into an amalgamation of all those around her—her wishing has been on behalf of others. In a final moment of clarity, she looks to her adopted family and knows that whatever ambitions her newfound fortune enables are, by proxy, her own.

That selflessness, of living vicariously through a new generation’s triumphs, is shared by Nina’s father, Kevin Rosario (Jimmy Smits), who sacrifices his lifelong business to put his daughter through school, and Usnavi, who pays to help his younger cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV) obtain legal status. This is the lesson the film’s younger characters come to learn: The question of whether to stay with your community or escape it is misguided.

In The Heights presents a distinct and diverse version of Latino culture in the United States. Washington Heights is a tapestry of its residents’ homelands: a bit Vega Alta , a bit Santo Domingo, and a mélange of other locations. Miranda and Hudes have captured a beautifully fragmented community that clings to what its members have in common while cognizant that they are not a monolith.

But for all that the film celebrates the specificity and beauty of Washington Heights, it also telegraphs that the neighborhood’s precious, incubated culture hinges on not the physical space itself but the people who inhabit it. Immigrants and their children— ni de aquí, ni de allá , “neither from here nor there”—make wherever they go an enclave of their own.

Within this constantly reinvented community, pursuing one’s aspirations affects the group. Nina’s song “Breathe” highlights the weight of responsibility borne by those who have “made it out” of the Heights. At the intersection of what the elders envision as success and what the young adults want for themselves is the film’s ultimate realization: Everyone’s little dreams are only partly their own.

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In the Heights

2021, Musical, 2h 23m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Lights up for In the Heights , a joyous celebration of heritage and community fueled by dazzling direction and singalong songs. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

Casting, choreography, songs, and story all come together In the Heights to offer pure joy in modern movie musical form. Read audience reviews

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Where to watch in the heights.

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In the heights videos, in the heights   photos.

The creator of "Hamilton" and the director of "Crazy Rich Asians" invite you to the event of the summer, where the streets are made of music and little dreams become big... "In the Heights." Lights up on Washington Heights... The scent of a cafecito caliente hangs in the air just outside of the 181st Street subway stop, where a kaleidoscope of dreams rallies this vibrant and tight-knit community. At the intersection of it all is the likable, magnetic bodega owner Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), who saves every penny from his daily grind as he hopes, imagines and sings about a better life. "In the Heights" fuses Lin-Manuel Miranda's kinetic music and lyrics with director Jon M. Chu's lively and authentic eye for storytelling to capture a world very much of its place, but universal in its experience.

Rating: PG-13 (Suggestive References|Some Language)

Genre: Musical

Original Language: English

Director: Jon M. Chu

Producer: Lin-Manuel Miranda , Quiara Alegría Hudes , Scott Sanders , Anthony Bregman , Mara Jacobs

Writer: Quiara Alegría Hudes

Release Date (Theaters): Jun 10, 2021  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Jun 10, 2021

Box Office (Gross USA): $29.9M

Runtime: 2h 23m

Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Production Co: Scott Sanders Productions, Warner Bros., Likely Story, 5000 Broadway Productions

Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos

Aspect Ratio: Scope (2.35:1)

Cast & Crew

Anthony Ramos

Melissa Barrera

Leslie Grace

Nina Rosario

Corey Hawkins

Olga Merediz

Abuela Claudia

Jimmy Smits

Kevin Rosario

Gregory Diaz IV

Daphne Rubin-Vega

Stephanie Beatriz

Dascha Polanco

Noah Catala

Graffiti Pete

Lin-Manuel Miranda

Quiara Alegría Hudes

Screenwriter

Scott Sanders

Anthony Bregman

Mara Jacobs

David Nicksay

Executive Producer

Kevin McCormick

Alice Brooks

Cinematographer

Myron I. Kerstein

Film Editing

Nelson Coates

Production Design

Brian Goodwin

Art Director

Andrew Baseman

Set Decoration

Mitchell Travers

Costume Design

News & Interviews for In the Heights

Andrew Garfield’s Five Favorite Movie Musicals

The 88 Most Anticipated Movies of 2021

Weekend Box Office Results: A Quiet Place Part II Upsets In the Heights To Top Weekend And Pass $100 Million

Critic Reviews for In the Heights

Audience reviews for in the heights.

Weeks ago, I listened to the original Tony Award-winning 2008 Broadway recording for In the Heights, the first major musical by multi-hyphenate artistic virtuoso, Lin-Manuel Miranda. I had never heard the music before and I found that, over the course of a couple hours, little of it stuck with me. There were a handful of tracks where I thought it was nice but nothing grabbed me the way that Hamilton's soundtrack did from the very start. Because of that musical dip, my expectations lowered slightly for the long-anticipated movie musical of In the Heights. Well, dear reader, let me say what a monumental world of difference seeing the songs in their proper context, with character relationships, and the able performances of the actors can do for making the music come alive. In the Heights is an exuberantly joyous experience, one brimming with energy and good vibes and a warm-hearted welcome that serves as the best argument movie theaters can have to come back and experience the pleasures of the big screen with your friends and family. Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) is a twenty-something bodega owner in New York City's Washington Heights neighborhood and dreaming about returning to his home in the Dominican Republic. His young cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV) helps him stock the shelves and keep the family business going. We follow the many faces of the neighborhood, like Abuela (Olga Merediz), who has helped raise everyone as a sweetly matronly figure, Nina (Leslie Grace), returning home from her first year at Stanford as the "girl who made something of herself," Benny (Corey Hawkins) who was in a relationship with Nina and is looking to work his way up as a cab dispatcher, Daniella (Daphne Rubin-Vega) who is moving her popular salon into another neighborhood, and Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), an aspiring fashion designer who dreams of relocating into Manhattan's fashion district. Usnavi has been nursing a crush over Vanessa for ages, but will he finally make a move before leaving the country for good to return to the Caribbean? This is such a positive and overwhelmingly optimistic story that it becomes infectious, a pleasing balm to sooth all that ails you. It's very easy to get swept away in the enthusiasm and energy of the movie, enough so that after the exemplary opening number setting up our characters, our setting, and our relationships and goals, people in my theater actually clapped, and I almost felt like joining them. In the Heights succeeds through how relatable and specific it comes across, lovingly showcasing the diverse population of Washington Heights and the community that feels at home here. It's built upon the celebration of its specific, Latin-American heritage and culture but the movie is also constructed to be so accessible and welcoming to others to learn and join in. The themes and conflicts of these people have specific touchstones to their community, like the threat of deportation and the encroachment of gentrification taking away their neighborhood, but the inner conflicts like feeling the pressure to succeed and questioning whether your dreams are practical are worries that anyone regardless of ethnic background can relate to. In the Heights finds that sweet spot where it's reverential to its own cultural background and open for anyone. Naturally, in a musical, much of the appeal will live or die depending upon the quality of the music and the vitality of the performances. With In the Heights, the music and lyrics are quite good and the presentation is phenomenal. If you're a fan of Hamilton, and if you have ears I assume you would be, it's fun to listen to the early seeds that would become the signature sound for Lin-Manuel Miranda. There are similar salsa/merengue melodies and hip-hop-infused syncopations that will be familiar to the legions of Hamilton fans, including some rhymes ("Eyes on the horizon" among others). In many ways it's like watching a junior thesis project of a genius. The opening number does a fantastic job of table setting as well as bringing the audience into this world and getting us excited for more. Usnavi, and Ramos especially, takes full control of our attention and command of the world with fast-paced delivery and extra charisma. There are more bouncy, humorous tunes like "No Me Diga" set in a salon replete with literal bobbing weaves, more traditional Broadway ballads like "Breathe" about a character expressing her doubts and guilt, and the Cole Porter-esque smooth jazz of our young lovers dancing and declaring their affection for one another like "When the Sun Goes Down." But the best moments are the ones that open up the big space and bring the whole community of Washington Heights into the mix. The electricity of the opening number is rekindled in "96,000" where a trip to the local pool turns into a jumping jamboree where everyone dreams about what they would do with a winning lottery ticket sold at Usnavi's bodega. It allows each character an opportunity to share their dream and what is important to them, providing each person a platform to be more defined. It also taps into that bubbling optimism that permeates the entire movie. The grand finale also has the same effect as characters sing their hearts out about lessons learned and wisdom gained and, thanks to the medium of film, it provides a happy ever after resolution that was unavailable on stage. Miranda is excellent at weaving musical themes to come back into multi-harmonic convergences and crescendos, and it all comes to a rousing and uplifting conclusion. Another concern about big screen musicals is whether they can translate to the visual landscape of cinema, whether they can escape the trappings of the stage, and In the Heights is exactly how musicals should be filmed. Director John M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) got his filmmaking start with the Step Up dance franchise and knows, whatever the film, how to keep things moving swiftly and full of vivacious energy. Even at nearly two-and-a-half hours long, In the Heights doesn't feel like it has any noticeable down time. The filmmaking choices adapt with the needs and intents of the songs, so when we have a fast-paced multi-part song and dance, the editing adopts this speed, and when we have large ensembles the cinematography widens to take in the expansive group choreography. When things need to slow down and become more intimate, Chu's camera adopts to this and relies on longer tracking shots and close to medium shots. The pool choreography in "96,000" is splashy fun and lively and very colorful, and the quick visual cues and edits of "In the Heights" incorporates the neighborhood into the music to make New York City feel like a living participant. Chu's direction takes full advantage of what film can offer but still makes the viewer feel the same intimacy and vibrancy of live theater. There are two standout movie moments. The first is the song "Paciencia Y Fe" that does so much symbolic heavy lifting about the immigrant experience, discrimination, and the long struggle for personal dignity, that it made me tear up by the end for a character that, only moments before the empathetic expose, was a nominally nice old lady. The other is "When the Sun Goes Down" between Benny and Nina, which begins with them gazing out a fire escape and takes a magical turn into dancing along the walls of their building like Spider-Man. That transitional moment, from the ordinary to the extraordinary, is the only real magical realism in the show, so Chu has been saving it up for his big moment. The dance is beautiful to behold, and the perspective has an Inception-style spin that alters their balance and perspective of what is up. It's a beautiful movie moment, captured in long takes, and reminiscent of Fred Astaire's fanciful fantasias. Ramos (A Star is Born) played John Laurens in the initial stage show of Hamilton, and its filmed production on Disney Plus, and now he gets his own starring vehicle. He is tremendous as Usnavi, convincingly laid back and charming while also being amusingly anxious around his crush. The awkward romantic fumbles are adorable. Ramos' singing and skill with the flow of rap lyrics is impressive, but he's also providing a performance first and worrying about the singing second, not that he should be worried on that front. Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton) surprised me with the range of his singing, and he's such a pleasant presence to have along. Gregory Diaz IV (Vampires vs. the Bronx) is hilarious at times, like when he's adopting a macho voice to ask Vanessa adult questions, but he can also break your heart like when he reveals his own legal vulnerability. His poolside solo is also a delightful interjection about what his own rap skills comprise. Merediz (Godmothered) is the only holdover from the original stage show and she is so captivating in her signature number that it's easy to understand why she was nominated for a Tony Award. There are so many amusing and enjoyable supporting characters populated by familiar faces, like the women of the salon (Rent's Ruben-Vega, Brooklyn 99's Stephanie Beatriz, and Orange is the New Black's Dascha Polanco) providing comic relief and a playful attitude, Jimmy Smits as the noble father giving of himself for his daughter's future, and Miranda and Hamilton's Christopher Jackson as dueling sweet treat vendors vying for summer supremacy. You'll enjoy your time in Washington Heights thanks to these fine folks. It's unfair to directly compare In the Heights to Hamilton, like looking at an artist's portfolio and complaining it isn't quite up to the standards of Da Vinci, but one area where In the Heights does come up short is the depth of its characterization. The film exudes good vibes as it skips over topical and important political issues with an optimism that might, arguably, borderline on naivete. This feels almost like the opposite-minded compliment to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, another tale of a New York City block one very hot day. The characters are kept at a genial level of interest that makes them enough to feel for and root for, but they're not exactly deep portrayals with complex conflicts. All the characters have a singularly defined personal conflict that can be resolved by the end, and the lessons about learning to listen to others, appreciate family and self, and find home where you feel it are not exactly revolutionary or complex. Again, this stuff works, and I understand why the story needs characters that have lesser complexity and definition to fulfill the different levels of life. It's just when compared to the depth of the real people of Hamilton where you realize that maybe the colorful characters of Washington Heights are held to a lesser standard and simply not as multi-dimensional. In the Heights is a joyous experience that I think I'll enjoy more upon re-watching and listening to the soundtrack over the summer months. I can completely understand why people fell in love with this musical upon its initial release and touring, and I can also acknowledge that it's clearly an earlier artistic steppingstone to greater later achievements for Miranda. That's not to take anything away from the pleasures of this particular story, these particular characters, and especially these particular songs. In the Heights is a lively and welcoming musical experience that carries a deep affection for its cultural roots and invitation for others to join that celebration. It's powerfully optimistic that it's so easy to be swept away and smile with its charms and uplift. In the Heights takes advantage of its cinematic opportunities, the charisma and energy of the talented cast, and the soaring and lovely melodies and catchy rhymes from Miranda. In the Heights is a great way to kick off a return to a summer season at the movies. Nate's Grade: A-

Some of the new material is inserted into the existing narrative in some very clunky ways, however at its best the movie is just as vibrant and emotional as the original stage production.

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The star-crossed history of In the Heights and West Side Story

New film adaptations of the two hit musicals from very different eras are 2021’s fascinating cinematic call-and-response.

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When In the Heights premiered on Broadway in 2008, it was a minor revelation. Through its exuberant, multicultural tale of community and economic struggle in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, seemed to be trumpeting his arrival onto the Broadway scene — and the entrance of his first show into the musical theater canon.

Miranda declared In the Heights ’ cultural significance from its very first notes: In the show’s opening number, in which Miranda’s semi-autobiographical character Usnavi introduces himself and his neighborhood to the audience, the first thing we hear is a rhythmic motif borrowed from another musical altogether.

It’s the same opening riff as that of “America” from West Side Story — Broadway’s other iconic tale about Latin American immigrants and migrants living in upper Manhattan. Those borrowed five notes were more than a homage to Leonard Bernstein ’s 1957 masterpiece, widely acknowledged as one of the greatest musicals ever written. They draw a direct link between the two musicals, announcing In the Heights as West Side Story ’s spiritual successor.

They also deliberately set up a call-and-response between the two musicals. The song “America,” specifically, is about the type of American immigrant and migrant experience that Usnavi still struggles with half a century after West Side Story : The conflict over whether to return to his Caribbean roots or settle down and fully embrace his life and his identity as a New Yorker.

In 2021, that call-and-response has been inverted in a fascinating way. This year, audiences will be treated to lavish film adaptations of both musicals, with the highly anticipated In the Heights arriving first. The film debuted in theaters and on HBO Max on June 11, directed by Crazy Rich Asians ’ Jon Chu, sporting a screenplay by Pulitzer-winning Quiara Alegría Hudes (who wrote the original stage script), and starring Miranda’s Hamilton protégé Anthony Ramos as Usnavi, it has already drawn raves from critics and fans, and it stands poised to be the hit of a parched post-pandemic summer.

Months later, in December, arrives Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story remake. From all appearances , the new film is a painstakingly crafted re-conceptualization of director/choreographer Jerome Robbins’s original iconic staging of the 1957 musical, with many visual homages to Robert Wise’s 1961 film adaptation. It’s still a ways off, but anticipation is already bubbling — and inevitably, the year’s two Latin American movie musicals are already being paired and pitted against one another, Thunderdome-style .

But is that comparison fair to either musical? Will In the Heights eventually be overshadowed by the much larger cultural legacy of West Side Story and Spielberg’s prestige as a director? Will West Side Story ’s outdated storytelling undermine its ability to speak to audiences in the 21st century?

Are the two musicals even that similar?

In a word, yes. Both stories deal with an inherent identity conflict that continues to resonate within America’s diverse urban communities. Not only that, but West Side Story ’s ongoing legacy is one that Miranda himself is directly tied to. Far from canceling each other out, understanding how the musicals are linked can deepen our appreciation of each one.

West Side Story is beloved — but it has an inherent authenticity problem

West Side Story is a modernization of Romeo and Juliet that depicts Shakespeare’s rival clans as warring New York street gangs. Staged by a team of Broadway legends, the show was hailed as groundbreaking and “ radioactive ” — in a good way — upon its premiere. Today, it’s beloved largely for two things.

The first is its magnificent Bernstein-Sondheim score, almost every song of which is a well-known hit, from ballads like “Somewhere” and “Maria” to upbeat bops like “I Feel Pretty,” “Cool,” and “Gee, Officer Krupke!” Really, every song in West Side Story is a banger, showcasing Bernstein’s ability to create jazz that sounds like New York — and you’ve probably heard them all at least once.

The second is Jerome Robbins’s staging and choreography. Equally important to the show’s legacy, it’s a fierce combination of contemporary jazz and ballet. Not only did Robbins’s dance moves drive the story’s characterization and plot, but they produced movements so successful, so well known, and so indelibly associated with West Side Story that the show is almost never performed without the original choreography. Reviewing the 2020 Broadway production (now set to reopen later this year), which did dare to remove and replace Robbins’s work, the New York Times’ Gia Kourlas scolded , “What Robbins created wasn’t just a series of dances, however peerless, but an overarching view of how, beyond anything else, movement could tell a story.”

No matter how sacrosanct Robbins’s choreography is, however, the impulse to replace or revamp it has grown over time, as part of an ongoing cultural push to reconfigure West Side Story altogether. That’s because while West Side Story is brilliant, it is decidedly not a realistic representation of street gangs or migrant communities. Though the show provides a reliably thrilling stage experience, its storytelling has always been the weakest spot in its otherwise impenetrable creative armor. And, increasingly, audiences and critics have regarded its narrative weaknesses as a byproduct of its real problem: a lack of cultural authenticity.

The men who created West Side Story , a true mid-century Broadway dream team, did have strong ties to immigrant culture. In addition to Robbins and Bernstein, veteran screenwriter Arthur Laurents (Hitchcock’s Rope ) wrote the book (the stage script), and a 27-year-old Stephen Sondheim made his Broadway debut as the show’s lyricist. All four men were the sons of Jewish families; three of them were lifelong New Yorkers. Robbins, who came up with the idea for the show, initially had in mind a story based on Irish and Jewish families on the Lower East Side — which Laurents then drafted as East Side Story in 1949, before he and Robbins decided it was too generic.

In 1955, however, a random Los Angeles Times article sent the nascent show’s story in a drastically different direction. The article dramatized the rise of teen gangs and described “rumbles” happening in immigrant neighborhoods all over LA and Manhattan. In Robert Emmet Long’s 2003 book Broadway, The Golden Years , Laurents mentions the article as the inspiration for a rethinking of East Side Story .

“I suggested the blacks and Puerto Ricans in New York,” Laurents recalled to Long, “because this was the time of the appearance of teenage gangs and the problem of juvenile delinquency was very much in the news. It started to work.”

“It” was the story that eventually became West Side Story . The central gang conflict was transferred onto a white gang and a Puerto Rican gang: the Jets versus the Sharks.

Not only were Laurents and Robbins not gang members, but they also seemed to be basing West Side Story on what is now understood to be the racist assumption that the gangs of the West Side must surely have racial conflict. (At least one later anecdote suggests they were all white and only mildly criminal, nothing like the dangerous delinquents depicted onstage.) Laurents invented the onstage slang to approximate street lingo. And despite half the characters being Puerto Rican, almost no Spanish was spoken onstage in the original production.

Writing for HowIRound in 2017, Yura Sapi explained the impact of West Side Story ’s fabricated storyline:

Not only was this mainstream story that depicted Puerto Rican migrants created and written by four white men, the story they chose to tell linked the Puerto Rican plight in New York in the 1950s to issues of gangs, not of migration, and the lead Puerto Rican character was played by a white Italian American actor. The Puerto Rican voice of the 1950s was stolen and rewritten for appropriated consumption. Meanwhile, the real issues the community faced as people looking for another shot at life as US citizens coming from a territory were ignored and essentially erased in the eyes of US American mass culture.

Criticism of West Side Story ’s lack of authenticity has sharpened and become more prevalent over the decades as a broader cultural understanding of West Side Story ’s flaws and weaknesses has grown. In 2008, that understanding became part of the conversation around a brand-new musical — when In the Heights became the toast of Broadway.

In the Heights presented itself as West Side Story ’s down-to-earth polar opposite

A half-century after West Side Story , Miranda’s own musical about intertwined lives and dreams in one Manhattan neighborhood presented itself as an example of authentic Latinx culture. Conceived and written by Miranda while he was still in college, the show was based loosely on people and events from his own life.

He joined with another creator of Puerto Rican descent, playwright and future Pulitzer-winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, to write the book. Miranda, a lifelong New Yorker, contributed the score, showcasing his unique talent for rapping, rhyming, and mixing musical genres in a way that reflected his own melting-pot community, Washington Heights — not unlike the way Bernstein famously fused jazz with pop, classical elements, and other genres to create West Side Story ’s distinctive urban soundscape.

West Side Story , like Romeo and Juliet , is a full-blown Shakespearean tragedy. Where its dramatic conflict was larger than life, most of the dramatic conflicts that move In the Heights are deliberately small scale. In the Heights is, in many ways, akin to the musicals of Rodgers and Hammerstein , in that its goal isn’t to present an epic, operatic drama but to thread the language of musical theater through a plot about realistic characters in everyday situations. Its characters deal with modern conflicts: struggles to make ends meet, fears of disappointing their parents, and conflicts between wanting love and wanting success.

It’s a sprightly, uplifting musical whose characters are reflections of Miranda himself: resilient, passionate, optimistic, and upbeat. The factors that render the community unstable are largely systemic: Money is tight. College is expensive. The power keeps going out in Washington Heights.

The rickety neighborhood infrastructure underscores a fact that is called out in the opening song with a direct address to the audience. Miranda’s character Usnavi (now played in the movie by Anthony Ramos) sings: “Now you’re prob’ly thinking, “I’m up shit’s creek / I’ve never been north of 96th Street” — invoking the truth that most of Broadway’s traditional viewership has little awareness that Manhattan exists above Central Park. Part of Miranda’s experiment with In the Heights involved inviting and engaging floods of new audiences, an approach he would later perfect with Hamilton in 2015. His efforts seemed to be a success: The show easily nabbed a Broadway run off the back of a hit off-Broadway engagement, and most critics were effusive about the show’s energy, ambitions, production, and performances. In the Heights went on to snag four Tony awards, including Best Score and Best Musical.

Where In the Heights lost fans was in the smallness of its storytelling. “Mr. Miranda and Ms. Hudes’s panorama of barrio life is untagged by any graffiti suggesting authentic despair, serious hardship or violence,” the New York Times’ Charles Isherwood chastised the off-Broadway production, as if unable to imagine a Latin community untouched by hardship and at peace with itself. The Daily News pined for “a show that had something to say that resonated beyond the 181st St. subway stop.”

Increasingly, modern audiences understand that these are the kinds of criticisms often used to gatekeep and stereotype diverse creators and prevent them from telling their own stories and sharing their own experiences. (“We should be able to be onstage without a knife in our hand,” Miranda said in 2015.) In 2008, In the Heights ’ popularity helped galvanize a new generation of theater fans to tell their own stories.

Perhaps even more impressive, it helped galvanize the then 91-year-old Arthur Laurents to revise his own musical masterpiece.

The two musicals have had intertwined legacies since In the Heights debuted

“Puerto Ricans, West Side — ring a bell?” New York magazine asked its 2007 review of In the Heights , then opening off-Broadway. The review’s title, “Something’s Coming,” was a direct reference to the song of the same name from West Side Story and demonstrated how linked the two shows were in the minds of Broadway audiences from the start.

That link further cemented itself in 2008 when In the Heights ’ success spurred Laurents to invite Miranda to take part in his radical new project: revising and directing an unprecedented bilingual revival of West Side Story . The production, which Laurents directed just three years before his death, was reportedly inspired by an all-Spanish production of the show in Colombia. In a feature story promoting the 2009 production, producer Jeffrey Seller described Laurents’ motive:

As Seller tells the story, Laurents’s former lover, who after years of study had become bilingual in Spanish, traveled to Colombia and attended a production of West Side Story performed entirely in Spanish. Upon returning to the States, he relayed to Arthur that for the first time it seemed as though the heroes were the Sharks, not the Jets. Arthur determined that it must have been because the Sharks were speaking their own language and had “home court advantage.” This led to the question: “What would happen if [someone] did West Side Story in English and Spanish, in which all of the characters could speak in their native tongue?” And in that question was the answer to “Why do West Side Story ?”: “To give cultural integrity back to the Latinos — back to the Puerto Ricans.” And thus the new bilingual revival of West Side Story was born.

Hoping to bolster the realism, rewrite Sondheim’s lyrics into Spanish, and add more Puerto Rican flourishes to the script, Laurents and Sondheim turned to Miranda, who was still enjoying his hit Broadway debut that same season. In a 2009 interview about the revival, Miranda neatly summed up the longstanding criticisms and contradictions of the show.

“I think West Side Story for the Latino community has been our greatest blessing and our greatest curse,” he said. “As a piece of art, I think it’s just about as good as it gets. It also represented our foot in the door as an artistic community on Broadway. At the same time, because it’s just about the only representation of Latinos on Broadway and it’s about gangs, that’s where it gets tricky.”

Laurents’ interest in making a bilingual West Side Story that restores agency to the Puerto Ricans now seems entirely in line with the way we think about these kinds of narratives in 2021; after all, over the last decade, Broadway has welcomed several major productions that expanded their authenticity by daring to be multilingual, like the 2015 Deaf West revival of Spring Awakening , which prominently featured sign language, and the popular 2018 all-Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof .

In 2008, however, the notion of swapping out up to 20 percent of West Side Story ’s original script proved a hard sell for Broadway, even though the change was sanctioned by the original writer. When the bilingual production finally premiered on Broadway in 2009, critics seemed baffled by the need for revision, with Reuters reviewer Frank Scheck describing the changes as “ gimmicky .” He added, “The idea that a musical as brilliant as ‘West Side Story’ would require reinventing seems a bit dubious.” Audiences resisted the changes too and, eventually, despite the hype surrounding the project, most of Miranda’s carefully spun Spanish lyrics were quietly changed back to English .

Today, we recognize that reinvention is a way to update legacy works of media so they may stay fresh and relevant, especially to new generations of audiences. Reinvention has, more and more, become the story of West Side Story ’s subsequent revival attempts.

But West Side Story is a creaky legacy work that resists easy updates. Beginning with Laurents’s efforts to inject more realism into the gritty lives of the show’s characters and continuing with the latest 2020 Broadway production , those update attempts have only made it clear how unwieldy such overhauls can be. “The problem with treating the musical’s stylized representations as documentary realism is that it presents ethnic caricatures as news footage,” the Atlantic’s Daniel Pollack-Pelzner explained . “[T]o accept the musical as an account of contemporary migrant trauma is to verge on parody. ... As a Latinx musical, West Side Story is incoherent and insulting. As the mid-century fantasy of queer Jewish artists, however, it’s surprisingly compelling.”

It’s not yet clear how Spielberg’s film will deal with these tensions. Certainly, the 1961 film adaptation has its own set of problems, including a largely whitewashed cast. What does seem clear is that In the Heights is now poised to enter the cultural conversation on a similar scale as West Side Story — not overriding the earlier work but expanding and continuing the conversation around it as the show and its adaptations continue to evolve. Perhaps, the best way to approach West Side Story , then, is neither to “cancel” it for being imperfect nor to overhaul it into a parody of itself and a parody of contemporary politics. It’s to simply allow various versions of it to exist, flaws and all, and to make space for more creators like Miranda, with more stories and perspectives.

In other words, as the lyrics of West Side Story ’s “Somewhere” attest, it’s to make “a place for us” — the new alongside the old. In the case of these two film adaptations, that happened literally: Both productions were shot in the summer of 2019, literally right next to each other. “It was a surreal moment, to walk basically 60 years through musical-theatre history in the space of two blocks,” Miranda told Empire in May. That physical closeness also underscores the films’ interconnectedness — and reminds us that stories with complicated histories can coexist with newer stories whose histories are still unfolding.

Correction: This article originally cited the casting of Rita Moreno in In the Heights (2021). Moreno does not appear in the film.

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• Entertainment

In the Heights Made Me Feel Seen — I Wish the Entire Latinx Community Could Say the Same

Published on 6/9/2021 at 7:45 PM

In the Heights isn't just a musical, it's a movement. It's showing the world that Latinx stories are immensely important and worth telling. Starring Anthony Ramos , Melissa Barrera , and Lin-Manuel Miranda, the cast is almost entirely made up of Latinx actors and their roles aren't stereotyped as maids or gardeners. As a Latina myself, it's not only refreshing to see actors that look like my family and friends on screen, but it's an incredibly crucial component of authentic storytelling.

With the exception of Selena: The Series , it's been a very long time since I've watched a show or movie where I've truly felt seen. I laughed at all the characters' jokes, I immediately recognized the Maizena and Café Bustelo in the bodega, I danced along with the music, I understood when they spoke Spanish, and I almost felt as if Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz) was my own grandmother giving me advice. Seeing the idiosyncrasies of Latinx culture being shown in such a positive light gave me an immense sense of pride and joy. It felt like home.

"We all deserve and expect equal representation."

While In the Heights is centered around New York's Washington Heights community, the struggles the characters face are centered around the same themes that a lot of Latinx community deals with across the US: family, gentrification, and immigration. Nina Rosario's storyline hit me the hardest. Nina is a first-generation college student who is struggling to fit in at Stanford University. During a conversation with Abuela Claudia, she opens up about feeling isolated and not having a sense of community at school while attempting to live up to her father's expectations. Nina later reveals that she was searched during moving day at Stanford after her roommate misplaced her pearl necklace.

As I listened to Nina tell her story, I suddenly found myself in tears flooded with memories from my own college experience. Similar to her, I too was the first in my family to go to college, so I know the unspoken pressures that come with that. I know what it's like to look around a room and see nobody else that looks like you. I know what's it like to be on your own and wrestle with trying to make your parents proud while also feeling like you're invisible and constantly questioning whether you actually belong. To be honest, those feelings have never fully gone away, but as Abuela Claudia said, we have to assert our dignity in small ways to show the world that we are not invisible and that's what I plan to continue to do.

Even though the film is the first time in a long time that I've felt seen, the same can't be said for the entire Latinx community. Leslie Grace, Dascha Polanco, and Daphne Rubin-Vega's appearances make up the few times Black Latinx actors are featured onscreen. Grace plays the role of Nina, while Rubin-Vegas takes on the supporting role of Daniela, the owner of a neighborhood salon, where Polanco's character, Cuca, works. Aside from Nina's story, we never get the chance to dive into the lives of Daniela and Cuca.

While there are a few Black Latinx actors featured in the cast, it would have been much more impactful if they were cast as leads; the main characters are basically a group of light-skinned Latinx actors. Not to mention, the lack of Black representation — in a movie that is based on a neighborhood that is predominantly Black Latinx — is especially glaring. Given the huge cultural impact of this film, I wish the Latinx people who weren't represented had had the same experience I did, because we all deserve and expect equal representation.

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Your Ultimate Guide to In the Heights

New York City in the summertime isn’t for everyone. It’s easy to love an afternoon in Central Park, a ride on the Cyclone, or a splurge at a Mister Softee truck (swirled cone with a cherry dip, please!), but finding joy amid the sweltering temperatures and teeming crowds is no small feat.

To see a New York summer onscreen in In the Heights (opening in theaters and on HBO Max on June 10), however, you’d never know it wasn’t paradise. In director Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the Tony-winning musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes (which tells the story of Usnavi, a Washington Heights bodega owner, and the friends and family who surround him, and features a cast that includes Anthony Ramos, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Corey Hawkins, and Jimmy Smits), the season in Upper Manhattan is a riot of singing, dancing, young love, big dreams, and one very eventful blackout.

“Washington Heights really comes into its own in the summer,” Miranda says. “The streets are alive with neighbors, and there is music pouring out of every car and corner store. It seems like the most natural setting for a musical possible. In the Heights is a love letter to this community.”

It’s also timed perfectly for a world that is reopening. “When we shot the movie, I had no idea what a blackout was like,” Chu says. “And then the pandemic happened, and our whole world experienced that powerlessness. How do we get out of that? Community and family are always timely to me, and so are music, celebration, and joy.”

So while the warmest months of 2021 may not be exactly like summers past, one beloved tradition is certain: There’s a blockbuster coming, and it promises to be hot.

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Here's How to Watch In the Heights

Go Behind the Scenes of the In the Heights Movie

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Celluloid Underground review – love letter to a lifelong passion for film and illicit treasure trove

Iranian critic Ehsan Khoshbakht’s personal essay about a man’s smizdat film print collection shows the lengths cinephiles will go to to protect the art form

T he passion of cinephilia is the subject of this absorbing personal essay movie from Iranian critic and film historian Ehsan Khoshbakht, now co-director of the Il Cinema Ritrovato festival in Bologna, Italy, who narrates the film in a style that reminded me a little of Mark Cousins and also perhaps Werner Herzog.

Khoshbakht grew up in post-revolutionary Iran where he developed a love of movies and of moving images generally, even the sternly meagre output on national TV. I laughed out loud at Khoshbakht’s entranced description of the TV’s humble colour test card: “As exciting as an MGM musical!” Khoshbakht (daringly) started a film club as a teenager, digitally projecting foreign movies videotaped from TV. He got into serious trouble for showing the Iranian classic The Cow by director Dariush Mehrjui, an anti-government protestor who was murdered last year (and sadly not included in the Oscars in memoriam section).

But even more importantly, Khoshbakht got to know an extraordinary man called Ahmad Jorghanian, a dedicated rescuer of 35mm films and posters whom this film honours as the “Iranian Henri Langlois”; that is, Iran’s unofficial equivalent of the celebrated French archivist and preservationist, hero of the 60s French New Wave . But unlike Jorghanian, Langlois was never arrested and tortured for his westernised film collection.

Jorghanian spent decades hoarding cans of film in his chaotic apartment and in cramped basements and hiding places all over Tehran, buying them from the warehouses and junk shops into which they had been dumped after being confiscated. Khoshbakht was able to project at least some of this illicit treasure trove on a samizdat basis, using borrowed projection facilities, and is ecstatic seeing these movies come to life once more.

In exile in London, Khoshbakht hears about the death of his old friend, and ponders the fate of Jorghanian’s collection: is film, like our own vulnerable human bodies, liable to decay into dusty nothingness? Historians will still protect what material they can, and protect the cinephilic language and culture that allows these films to be appreciated.

• Documentary films
• Middle East and north Africa
• Film criticism

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