‘In the Heights’ Film Review: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Stage Hit Becomes a Screen Celebration
The film’s mix of musical styles and Latino characters gives voice (and dance) to a community too rarely celebrated in major-studio movies
Monica Castillo | May 21, 2021 @ 8:00 AM
Warner Bros.
In Broadway history, there have been only a handful of musicals that center on U.S. Latinos, and only a fraction of those shows were written by people from the communities they were portraying on stage. That’s part of the reason why Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” made waves when it opened on Broadway back in 2008 (after a successful Off Broadway run). More than a decade later, and after a slight pandemic delay, Jon M. Chu’s cinematic adaptation of Miranda’s first musical promises to make an even bigger splash with its celebration of family, love, and the idea of home.
In the Heights.
Warner Bros.
Every reaction to a work of art is always linked to the moment in which we see it. How it came to exist in the first place, and what the world is like when we view it, matters. So when a movie first hits theaters, it’s ridiculous to pretend it can be evaluated from some objective, context-neutral vantage point. With the perfectly pitched, spectacularly revealing, sensational screen adaptation of
In the Heights, I wouldn’t even try.
One of the first major films to be delayed out of its summer 2020 slot, the long-awaited release of
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In a quietly moving interlude from “In the Heights,” Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), the beloved matriarch of a Washington Heights barrio, has a heart-to-heart with one of her many surrogate grandchildren. Nina Rosario (Leslie Grace), back home after a rough freshman year at Stanford, describes her sense of loneliness and alienation at a campus devoid of her usual community something Claudia, who immigrated to New York from Cuba in 1943, knows a thing or two about. Reminiscing about the beautiful gloves Nina’s late mother used to wear, concealing hands that were cracked from hours spent cleaning other people’s homes, Claudia says, “We had to assert our dignity in small ways … lit