THE GUARDIAN
Rating: 
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
Rating:
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 forgiving of the sanitised take on gang culture and simplistic character motivations. Those elements just don’t ring as true in 2021. For all the finger-snapping, this West Side Story doesn’t quite click’
VARIETY
Owen Gleiberman writes: ‘Steven Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’ has a brash effervescence. You can feel the joy he got out of making it, and the kick is infectious. Directing his first musical, Spielberg 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 cringe-worthy 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 reverently true to what generations have loved about ‘West Side Story’: the swoon factor, the yearning beauty of those songs, the hypnotic jackknife ballet of ’50s delinquents dancing out their aggression on the New York streets’
DEADLINE
Peter Hammond writes: ‘For Spielberg, finally a musical — one I initially was surprised to hear he felt the need to reimagine but one that comes alive as proof of its endurance and long-lasting worth. It’s also further evidence, if it ever was needed, of the gifts of a filmmaker who recognizes the greatness of those who came before him and finds a way to honor them by making it all seem like so new and important once again’
LOS ANGELES TIMES
Justin Chang writes: ‘Spielberg’s filmmaking, of course, is another language intuitive enough for any moviegoer to understand. It may be worth noting that America’s most popular director has never before directed an entry in what was once America’s most popular film genre, but that fact almost pales into insignificance given his instinctive sense of visual rhythm, proportion and kinetic flow, his gift for orchestrating moments that trigger near-Pavlovian bursts of feeling’
SCREEN DAILY
Tim Grierson writes: ‘A solidly entertaining remake peppered with a few transcendent moments, Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story emphasises the musical’s most beloved elements without trying to radically reinterpret the source material. Sixty years after the original film arrived in theatres, eventually winning 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, this remake boasts intimacy and emotion, creating a warm sense of deja vu mitigated by the story’s still-potent condemnation of bigotry and violence’
COLLIDER
Matt Goldberg writes: ‘For mere mortals, trying to make a new version would seem daunting, but Steven Spielberg launches himself headfirst into this new adaptation that feels fresh and immediate while still retaining the classic feel of the original. Working from a script from Tony-winning playwright Tony Kushner, Spielberg’s West Side Story is more politically pointed than the 1961 version, but it still feels firmly in the mold of a classic musical with the incredible camerawork, color palette, and choreography popping off the screen’
IGN
Siddhant Adlakha writes: ‘Not everything works in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story — how could it, when the 1961 classic is nigh unimpeachable? — but his visual translation of some of the original’s latent ideas makes it a complementary piece. At once rougher and more dazzling, it has tremendous high points that seldom overlap with its predecessor, resulting in a remake that feels both hyper-charged and wholly justified. A true thing of beauty’
INDIEWIRE
David Ehrlich writes: ‘The filmmaker honors a sacred piece of musical theater by flexing all over it with some of the most exhilarating setpieces he’s ever shot, but there are a handful of puzzling missteps’