Blissfully colourful, fun and basic: In The Heights reviewed

In The Heights is an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s smash-hit stage musical — the one he wrote before Hamilton — and it is all-singing, all-dancing, and a ‘feelgood summer movie’, as they say. True, the storytelling is quite basic — anyone frowning over a calculator is sure to have money worries — and by the end of two and a half hours you may well be praying for less singing, and less dancing, I beg you. But what the hell. It’s colourful, it’s fun. It has an unstoppable energy. It has some tremendous set-pieces. And it’s blissfully straightforward. It’s not one of those films that comes at you like a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle and neither will it send you running to the internet to search for ‘insert-name-of-film explainer’, which is just such a relief, as I seem to have seen so many of those lately. This is, in fact, the first big blockbuster release since Tenet, and I’m still googling explainers for that.