THE GUARDIAN
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Peter Bradshaw writes: 'Steven Spielberg's West Side Story 2.0 is an ecstatic act of ancestor-worship: a vividly dreamed, cunningly modified and visually staggering revival. No one but Spielberg could have brought it off, creating a movie in which Leonard Bernstein's score and Stephen Sondheim's lyrics blaze out with fierce new clarity... West Side Story is contrived, certainly, a hothouse flower of musical theatre, and Spielberg quite rightly doesn't try hiding any of those stage origins. His mastery of technique is thrilling; I gave my heart to this poignant American fairytale of doomed love'
EMPIRE
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Helen O'Hara writes: 'It's Spielberg who is the MVP. He keeps the expressionist colours and bold shapes of the '61 film but opens out the stage to the real world, mixing showy shots, like the stretching shadows of the Jets and Sharks meeting on a battlefield, and lived-in communities, like the giant street party that is 'America', without losing sight of the emotion. Let's hope this is the first and not the only Spielberg musical... Heartfelt and heart-breaking, this feels like Spielberg has made an adaptation faithful to its roots but also, always, alive to the modern world.'
THE TELEGRAPH
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Robbie Collin writes: 'West Side Story is, I believe, Spielberg's finest film in 20 years, and a new milestone in the career of one of our greatest living directors. A little less than a month before his 75th birthday, he has delivered a relentlessly dazzling, swoonily beautiful reworking of the 1957 Manhattan-set musical by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim, which feels just as definitive and indestructible as the previous screen adaptation, directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins'
TIME OUT
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Phil De Semlyen writes: 'There's a substrata of genius-level artists at work here: from Spielberg himself, who delivers his best film in nearly 20 years, to the late, great Stephen Sondheim (lyricist), Jerome Robbins (choreographer), Leonard Bernstein (arrangements) and William Shakespeare (most of the rest of it) – and you can really feel it'
NEW YORK POST
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Johnny Oleksinski writes: 'It's the 'ET' director's most visually exciting film in a zillion years. Still, it's not gonna become a classic in the way the 1961 original did. Where this 'Story' occasionally walks into West Side Highway traffic is screenwriter Tony Kushner's many needless additions to the script. The 'Angels in America' scribe has never met a plot he couldn't stretch out like a medieval torture victim'
GAMES RADAR
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Matt Maytum writes: 'Steven Spielberg's West Side Story is that curious kind of remake: impressively put together, but so reverentially similar to the original it doesn't quite warrant the effort... By modernising elements without drastically shaking up the whole, it draws attention to some of the film's conspicuously old-fashioned elements. Sixty years of history allows the original film some slack for some of its shortcomings, like the aforementioned inauthentic casting. But time is also
