FILM REVIEW
Director: Steven Spielberg
Starring: Ansel Elgort, Rachel Zegler, Ariana DeBose, Mike Faist
Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” has a brash effervescence. You can feel the joy that went into making it, and the kick is infectious. Spielberg, directing his first musical, moves into the big roomy space of a Broadway-meets-Hollywood classic, rearranges the furniture (the film’s screenwriter, Tony Kushner, has spiced up the dialogue and tossed out the most cringeworthy knickknacks) and gives it all a fresh coat of desaturated, bombed-out-city-block, gritty-as-reality paint. He makes it his own. At the same time, Spielberg stays true to what generations have loved about “West Side Story”: the swoon factor, the yearning beauty of those songs, the hypnotic jack-knife ballet of ’50s delinquents dancing out their aggression on the New York…