Chico & Rita

Directed by Fernando Trueba, Javier Mariscal, and Tono Errando

(Not rated)

***

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This “animated valentine” to Cuba “brings alive an almost unimaginably rich and resonant moment in musical history,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “A whole palette of feeling can be experienced” in the music alone, much of it courtesy of pianist Bebo Valdés, who was the bandleader of Havana’s Tropicana Club before Castro’s revolution. The movie, an adult-themed Oscar contender for Best Animated Feature, chronicles the love affair of a Bebo-like young pianist and the sultry singer he follows to New York from Cuba in the late 1940s. Keeping with the period spirit, the film is hand-drawn and simply “gorgeous to look at,” said Stephanie Zacharek in Movieline.com. Its stylized images are “as fluent in capturing the movement of human bodies” as in re-creating the look of the times. Sure, the boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl plot follows a familiar trajectory, said Andrew O’Hehir in Salon​.com. But with a look this inventive and music this magical, “it all feels new.” And while “you certainly don’t have to be a jazz aficionado” to appreciate the film, fans of the genre “will find treasures inside treasures here.”