''Rent'' is one of the 10 movies we can't wait to see

”Rent” is one of the 10 movies we can’t wait to see

RELEASE DATE Nov. 23

WHY WE CAN’T WAIT How about — lo-o-o-ve? Er, sorry, it’s hard to resist singing the score to the long-awaited adaptation of the Broadway musical, which manages to reunite almost all of the original cast.

THE PREMISE In the 1980s, New York City’s then-gritty East Village brings together cutting-edge young artists, sexual free-spirits, and tragically, the AIDS virus.

SOURCE Jonathan Larson’s Tony-winning 1996 musical, which in turn is an update of Puccini’s opera La Boheme

THE BACK STORY Rosario Dawson is one of the cast’s few newbies, but she was raised in the neighborhood. ”Having grown up in a squat, I knew what it was like. And playing someone like [Mimi] just made me want to nurture that girl I grew up around.”

BURNING QUESTION Is anodyne kiddie-film director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) the right director for this material?

COME FOR The names you know — Dawson, Taye Diggs, Law & Order‘s Jesse L. Martin

STAY FOR The names you may not know, including Idina Menzel, Adam Pascal, Anthony Rapp, and the amazing Wilson Jermaine Heredia as the drag queen Angel