It S Officially Summer With In The Heights

If you’re vaxxed and eager to return to movie theaters, I can’t imagine a better film to see this summer than In the Heights. Years before Lin-Manuel Miranda found earth-shattering success in Hamilton, he wrote and starred in In the Heights, the Tony Award-winning musical portraying New York City’s Washington Heights neighborhood and the people who call it home. On June 11, director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) brings the simultaneously grand and intimate story to the big screen.

The film has huge emotional range, at once a neighborhood block party, a celebration of community and home, but also an intimate invitation into the locals’ resilience, and a memorial for the way life used to be, before gentrification and growing up and political conflicts around immigration seeped into the frame. It’s not perfect, impeded by the use of multiple storytelling frameworks and occasionally lacking cohesion, but it’s a blast, perfectly timed for this hopeful summer of reopening in the U.S.

Dir. Jon M. Chu, 143 min., PG-13, HBO Max, in wide release in theaters including AMC Theatres, Landmark’s Century Centre Cinema, Logan Theatre, Music Box Theatre, Regal Webster Place, and ShowPlace ICON