Avis des critiques

A veteran of the Step Up series... Chu knows how to shoot dance, and he and choreographer Christopher Scott provide these tunes with the moves they deserve. There are high-kicking Jacques Demy ensemble routines, Astaire-like gravity-defying waltzes, passages of Bob Fosse-esque snap and pizzazz, and best of all, an enormous aquatic number at an outdoor swimming pool that may be the closest we’ll ever come to finding out what would have happened if Busby Berkeley had made a Fast & Furious film.

This is an imperfect film that still captures an elusive and incandescent vibe, as alluring as a strand of lights strung up for an impromptu concrete picnic... The triumph of In the Heights, as movie or play, is that Miranda makes his streets our streets too. There’s room for everyone no matter how crowded the sidewalks get.

Chu’s sharp direction breaks out of the limitations of a theatrical space, expanding the film’s scope to capture a sense of the busy, bustling life in this neighborhood. His vision expands and enriches the show’s rendering of Washington Heights into a moving spectacle, elevating mundane mornings or trips to the pool into something mesmerizing and exhilarating.

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.

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.

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...

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s screenplay (adapted from her original book for the musical) integrates that political aspect shrewdly, melding identity to history more urgently than the stage version did.

The result is every cheesy cliché a lazy critic could possibly resort to: toe-tapping, grin-inducing, sincere, and stupidly irresistible. But it also has a righteous anger stitched in among its big tunes and hopeful romances that catch you off guard. This is no mere sugary feelgood fodder.

It’s impossible to object to In the Heights with its almost childlike innocence... But this is a pretty quaint image of street life, whose unrealities probably worked better on stage.

For all the rap and salsa influences and the specificity of its cultural setting — these characters take enormous pride in their heritage and the many national origins they represent — this is a big, soppy, traditional musical, a story about a tight-knit community helping one another through their issues with a shared sense of scrappy optimism and a killer sense of rhythm, to enormously uplifting effect.

What cinema affords so readily to its storytellers is the ability to visually build a full, richly layered world in a way you really can’t do onstage. In the Heights director Jon M. Chu, hot off his Crazy Rich Asians success, leans into the possibilities. Now, Washington Heights is a character, not just a few buildings.

In The Heights’ boisterous tone — its uplifting mix of defiance and perseverance — deftly communicates the sense of scraping by but dreaming of more, facing discrimination but refusing to be silenced... Despite its occasional shortcomings, the film goes for grand flourishes, highlighted by Alice Brooks’ sun-splashed cinematography and Nelson Coates’ colourful production design, and that impassioned desire to be heard resonates.