West Side Story: Critic Reviews

What they have done with West Side Story in knocking it down and moving it from stage to screen is to reconstruct its fine material into nothing short of a cinema masterpiece.

Leonard Bernstein's rich, eloquent and demanding score is still a powerful experience.

It is a great movie ... in parts.

The marvel is that the film still works so well.

Decent 1961 adaptation of the Bernstein-Robbins musical, if you can handle Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood in the leads.

West Side Story is a beautifully-mounted, impressive, emotion-ridden and violent musical which, in its stark approach to a raging social problem and realism of unfoldment, may set a pattern for future musical presentations.

West Side Story is a beautifully-mounted, impressive, emotion-ridden and violent musical which, in its stark approach to a raging social problem and realism of unfoldment

It still represents a brave and effective fusion of serious and fantasy elements, and offers two and one-half hours of solid entertainment.

Unhappily, the film shares a serious flaw in the essential conception of the show; both are founded on a phony literary analogy and on some potentially vicious pseudo-sociology.

[VIDEO ESSAY] Indisputably the greatest musical ever made, "West Side Story" (1961) has sadly proven socially timeless regarding America's eternally troubled immigrant experience.

Even though I had to play it for my high school choir, I was never a fan of the music. Everything else - the cinematography, choreography and story are all pretty stellar.

You have to admire the way every aspect of the film works toward the emotional impact.

West Side Story remains one of the best musicals of all-time.

An extraordinary song and dance experience laced within a quotidian dramatic tale.

A landmark screen musical that left its own indelible stamp on popular culture. [Blu-ray]

it is the heat of West Side Story's social and cultural conflicts that make it a pop-culture landmark unlike any other

A good stab at 'Romeo And Juliet', if a little on the anaemic side, but it's the singing and dancing which will really get your pulse racing.

This adaptation of the Broadway hit has only half the vitality of the stage show. But even that half renders it a classic.

It's impossible to begrudge the vertiginous energy and feeling that make this one of the great American musicals, and one radically told through dance.

Not seen it? Time you did.

...the film's minor deficiencies [are] generally canceled out by its pervasive atmosphere of good-natured exuberance.

stands proudly alongside other musicals that retain their relevance

Bernstein's music, Sondheim's lyrics and Robbins's choreography are great, but as a movie it falls short of the truly inspired cinematic musicals.

Technically stunning, with dazzling choreography matching an unforgettable score.