lights

Romance permeates Jon M. Chu’s big screen adaptation of In the Heights, like the aroma of charcoal on a summer day. Perhaps this should be obvious since the central conflict of the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical remains its two star-crossed couples working things out at the northern, tip-top peak of Manhattan. Yet that’s not where the movie’s true passion lies; like the source material before it, the In the Heights film’s real ardor is for the neighborhood of Washington Heights itself. How else could a picture so endear you to what is otherwise a cup of bodega coffee? As a jubilant…