“It has become difficult to imagine Jerome Robbins’s choreography for West Side Story without Robert Wise’s widescreen interpretation that, like the dances, continually reinvents and reinterprets the standoff between the Sharks and the Jets. This is a universe of repetitive movements across unbridgeable distances, like the gaps between youthful love and adult prejudice, and between the American dream and the New York reality that inform the film’s central Romeo and Juliet plot” (Pacific Film Archive).