Film review: West Side Story 

Steven Spielberg’s ravishing remake of the classic 1961 musical

Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story
Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story
(Image credit: 20th Century Studios)

Joaquin Phoenix has played a succession of misfits, loners and oddballs in recent years, said Alistair Harkness in The Scotsman. But in C’mon C’mon he shows his extraordinary range by playing a regular guy – Johnny, a radio producer in New York who volunteers to look after his nine-year-old nephew Jesse (Woody Norman) while the boy’s mother deals with a family crisis. Eventually the pair hit the road, travelling everywhere from New York to New Orleans and Detroit, as Johnny records a documentary about children. The story is “essentially about a cute kid bonding with an emotionally stunted adult”, but director Mike Mills avoids the traps of this “mini-genre” by approaching his subject matter with “honesty, humour and a refusal to serve up easily resolved emotional problems”.

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