Movie reviews: 'West Side Story' is Spielberg's most compelling film in years

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Ansel Elgort as Tony, left, and Rachel Zegler as Maria in "West Side Story." (Niko Tavernise/20th Century Studios via AP)

WEST SIDE STORY: 4 STARS

The list of films Hollywood considers sacred and untouchable is a short one. Only a bugger for punishment would attempt a redo of “The Godfather.” And imagine the jeers that would accompany the announcement of a reimagined “Casablanca” or “Do the Right Thing."

Until recently I would have put “West Side Story,” the classic 1961 musical that won 10 Academy Awards, in the top five of films on the 'no go' list. But just as that show riffed on “Romeo and Juliet,” a classic if there ever was one, Steven Spielberg takes another look at a memorable movie the TCM crowd considers untouchable.

Set in 1950s New York City, the story of love at first sight is played out against a backdrop of the gentrification of the Upper West Side, a then blue-collar neighbourhood. Two gangs, the Puerto Rican Sharks and the Jets, the “Last of the Can’t Make It Caucasians,” run the streets as the NYC Department of Slum Clearance chop up their home turf. The only thing they have in common is a “womb-to-tomb” membership motto.

Into this comes Tony and Maria (Ansel Elgort and newcomer Rachel Zegler), star-crossed lovers whose infatuation causes friction between the gangs. “You’re going to start World War III,” says Anita (Ariana DeBose).

Tony’s best friend Riff (Mike Faist) runs the nativist white Jets—“Everything is being taken over by people I don’t like,” he sneers—while Maria’s brother Bernardo (David Alvarez) leads the Sharks.

Tony is on parole for almost beating a boy to death in a rumble, but has turned over a new leaf. “I want to unlike myself,” he says, “because I was headed to the sewer.” He also puts to rest the notion that “once you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.” He wants out of that life, but most of all, he wants Maria.

As Riff and Bernardo plan a rumble to viciously work out their differences, Maria begs Tony to put an end to the violence. “We can’t pretend what we do didn’t cause this trouble,” she says. Tony intervenes, but the situation quickly spirals out of control.

Steven Spielberg’s take on “West Side Story” feels rooted in the tradition of movie musicals, but vibrates with current themes. The social mindfulness that was revolutionary for musical theatre in the 1950s Broadway run is present and expanded on. Tony Kushner’s script offers context and backstories for underdeveloped characters and plays on hot button themes of racial animus, poverty, and violence.

Most of all, however, it’s about love.

It’s love that causes all the trouble but also gives the movie its beating heart. As the couple in question Elgort and Zegler are appealing, wide-eyed romantic figures. Zegler is a convincing swirl of determination and innocence, with a beautiful voice. Elgort can wrap his mouth around Stephen Sondheim’s lovely lyrics—"Maria, say it loud and there's music playing. Say it soft and it's almost like praying"—but doesn’t shine as bright as some of his co-stars.

As Bernardo, Alvarez brings the menace, smooth charm, and athletic dance moves to steal his scenes. Faist also impresses as hardheaded gang leader Riff. DeBose gives a high stepping performance as Bernardo’s girlfriend Anita; a role that grows more poignant in the movie’s third act.

But it’s a returning cast member from the 1961 film who gives the movie its soul.

Rita Moreno won an Oscar for playing Anita in the original. Here she plays drug mart operator Valentina. Kushner expands the role, making the character the conscience of the neighbourhood. She is luminous in the part, and, in a major departure from the 1961 film, does a solo rendition of “Somewhere,” a song of hope usually sung by the romantic leads. Here it is devastating, played as song of longing and loss. If my goosebumps voted for the Academy Awards, Moreno would have another statue to put on her shelf.

“West Side Story” is Spielberg’s most compelling film in years. It reinvents, reimagines, and recontextualizes a classic story with energy, respect, and lots of finger snapping.

DON’T LOOK UP: 3 ½ STARS

Movies about giant objects hurdling through space toward Earth are almost as plentiful as the stars in the sky. “Armageddon,” “Deep Impact,” and “Judgment Day” all pose end-of-the-world scenarios, but none have the satirical edge of “Don’t Look Up.” The darkly comedic movie, now in theatres but coming soon to Netflix, paints a grim, on-the-nose picture of how the world responds to a crisis.

Jennifer Lawrence is PhD candidate Kate Dibiasky, a student astronomer who discovers a comet the size of Mount Everest aimed directly at our planet. Her professor, Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), comes to the alarming conclusion that the comet will collide with Earth in six months and 14 days in what he calls an “extinction level event.”

They take their concerns to NASA and the White House, but are met with President Janie Orlean’s (Meryl Streep) concerns about optics, costs and the upcoming mid-term elections. “The timing is just disastrous,” she says. “Let’s sit tight and assess.”

With the clock ticking to total destruction Dibiasky and Mindy go public, but their dire warnings on the perky news show “The Rip”—“We keep the bad news light!”—go unheeded. Social media focusses on Dibiasky’s panic, creating memes of her face, while dubbing Mindy the 'Bedroom Eyed Doomsday Prophet.'

As the comet hurdles toward Earth, the world becomes divided between those willing to look up and do something about the incoming disaster, and the deniers who think that scientists “want you to look up because they are looking down their noses at you.”

Chaos breaks out, and the division widens as the comet closes in on its target.

It is not difficult to find parallels between the events in “Don’t Look Up” and recent world occurrences. Director and co-writer Adam McKay explores the reaction to world affairs through a lens of Fake News, clickbait journalism, skepticism of science, political spin, and social media gone amok. In fact, the topics McKay hits on don’t really play like satire at all. The social media outrage, bizarro-land decisions made by people in high offices, and the influence of tech companies all sound very real world as if ripped out of today’s newspapers.

It’s timely, but perhaps too timely. Social satire is important, and popular—“Saturday Night Live” has done it successfully for decades—but “Don’t Look Up,” while brimming with good ideas, often feels like an overkill of familiarity. The comet is fiction, at least I hope it is, but the reaction to it and the on-coming catastrophe feels like something I might see on Twitter just before the lights go down in the theatre.

It feels a little too real to be pure satire. There are laughs throughout, but it’s the serious questions that resonate. When Mindy, on TV having his “Network” moment, rages, “What the hell happened to us? What have we done to ourselves and how do we fix it?” the movie becomes a beacon. The satire comes easily—let’s face it, the world is full of easy targets—but it’s the asking of hard questions and in the frustration of a world gone mad, when McKay’s point that we’re broken and don’t appreciate the world around us, shines through.

Despite big, glitzy Hollywood names above the title and many laugh lines, “Don’t Look Up” isn’t escapism. It’s a serious movie that aims to entertain, but really wants to make you think.

BEING THE RICARDOS: 3 ½ STARS

“Being the Ricardos,” the new Aaron Sorkin directed look at the most famous television couple of the 1950s, in theaters this weekend and on Prime Video December 21, is a character study that examines one very bad week on the sitcom set of “I Love Lucy.”

In 1953, “I Love Lucy” was watched by 60 million people a week. The show was so popular that department stores had to change their hours. The big box stores used to stay open late on Mondays, but switched to Thursdays because no one shopped on Monday nights while Lucy, Desi, Fred, and Ethel were on.

Real life couple Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, played in the film by Nicole Kidman and Javier Bardem, are television’s biggest stars as they prepare to shoot episode four of their second season. Tension hangs heavy over the set as the result of two news stories about the couple.

First is Confidential Magazine, a sleazy tabloid that specializes in scandal and exposé journalism, that accuses Desi of having an affair in a lurid article titled "Desi's Wild Night Out.” More damningly, another report suggests Lucy is a communist, under investigation by the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The accusation against Desi causes trouble at home, but even a whiff of communism around Lucy could lead to a stink that would ruin both their careers. The Hollywood blacklist looms.

“You and me have been through worse than this,” Desi says reassuringly.

“Have we?” she asks.

“No.”

Set up like a pseudo-documentary, modern day talking heads keep the story moving forward while flashbacks flesh out the action. We learn about how the couple met, their volatile relationship—"They were either tearing each other’s clothes off,” says writer Madelyn Pugh (Linda Lavin), “or tearing one another’s heads off.”—and how the show and Lucy’s perfectionism are more than just a professional concern. “I Love Lucy” was the glue that held her marriage together, especially during troubled times.

It can be tricky portraying familiar figures on screen. Through endless re-runs Lucille Ball’s face and comedy are iconic, but Kidman and Bardem wisely chose not to do imitations of the stars. They have the mannerisms and a passing resemblance to Lucy and Desi, but this is about character not caricature. For the most part, this is a backstage drama that wisely stays away from restaging scenes from “I Love Lucy” that are burned into people’s imaginations. What we get instead are interpretations of these characters that corral their collective charisma, hot tempers and talent.

What emerges is a scattershot portrait of fame, creative control and the power of the press. Sorkin juggles a lot of moving parts, but by the time the end credits roll, it’s difficult to know exactly what point he is trying to make. Ball is given the credit she deserves as a trailblazer and Arnaz’s business acumen is celebrated, but the other, colliding plot points feel cobbled together. Any one of them—the communism scare, Desi’s alleged infidelity, Lucy’s pregnancy or the cast in-fighting—could have sufficed as a compelling backdrop to the Lucy and Desi story. Instead, the movie feels overstuffed.

“Being the Ricardos” does justice to the legacy of its subjects, and features pages of Sorkin’s trademark, snappy dialogue, but splinters off in too many directions to be truly effective.