Steven Spielberg’s <em>West Side Story</em> Is an Undeniable Triumph
The film is a genuinely thoughtful update on a classic.
Steven Spielberg has been making films that feel like musicals for his entire career. No, the fearsome shark of and dinosaurs of didn’t belt out a tune, and heroes like Indiana Jones and Tintin weren’t dancing through their set pieces, but they might as well have been. Spielberg is an expert at the careful choreography of camera blocking; his gift for legibly communicating complicated sequences of movement on a massive scale is second to none. So the announcement that he was finally tackling a full-blown musical was perfectly logical—a challenge he’d clearly be able
