Upon viewing In the Heights, I felt as if I were watching the birth of a new subgenre: the nine-hour musical. Then I checked the running time and discovered that, technically, In the Heights is only two hours and fifteen minutes long. But the effect it creates is a new one — the film stretches time to the point that you become highly conscious of all you might have accomplished in your life if you hadn’t watched In the Heights.

So far In the Heights is doing underwhelming business in theaters (as well as on HBO Max), though the sunny, sentimental, endlessly affirming musical with its seventy-five song-and-dance numbers had been touted as perfect summer fare, ideal for reassuring and cheering up a population uneasily emerging from the pandemic.

Meanwhile, horror films such as A Quiet Place Part II and The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It are big hits. This makes sense to me, at least. We’ve got plenty to be anxious about and we know it. It seems far easier and more relaxing right now to sublimate our immediate fears by watching movie monsters than to strain to make the imaginative leap into scenarios where hundreds of people are feeling so gosh-darn fine that spontaneous dancing in the street is called for roughly every ten minutes.