Get the latest gossip
‘Beatles ’64’ Review: The Beatles’ First Visit to America Looks New Again in an Electrifying Documentary Produced by Martin Scorsese
Director David Tedeschi takes vérité footage shot by the Maysles brothers and incorporates it into a meditation on what the Beatles meant in 1964.
The technological upgrade is stunning, but the reason the footage feels so alive is that the Maysles were extraordinary filmmakers who always caught the reality behind the mythology (which is why their work has always stood the test of time). Another thing that sets “Beatles ’64” apart is that the film is full of incisive commentary: latter-day reminiscences by several of those fans, as well as meditations on the meaning of it all by figures like David Lynch, Joe Queenan, Jamie Bernstein, and Smokey Robinson, who speaks with fierce perception about the nature of women’s unguarded emotionalism in dictating the shape of pop-music culture. Seated in their “prison” of a suite in the Plaza, whiling away the hours (scenes that might have been the model for “A Hard Day’s Night”), always cutting up with that whimsical Liverpool put-on that takes everything just so lightly, as if it weren’t real, they were perfectly positioned, as personalities, to become the eye of the new media storm.
Or read this on Variety
