John Lennon

News, Reviews & Features
  • It Was Fifty Years Ago Today! The Beatles: Sgt Pepper & Beyond

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 29th May 2017

    Where Ron Howard's Eight Days a Week ends, as the teenage screams die down after the last chord struck at Candlestick Park, Alan G Parker's new documentary begins. Timed to coincide with Sgt Pepper's fiftieth anniversary and hoping to catch the wave of tributes and looks-back that will go along with it, it takes us from the end of Beatlemania into the start of the studio years and through the recording of their most significant album. And it doesn't come near to doing it justice.

  • The Beatles: Eight Days A Week – The Touring Years

    Movie Review | Ed Williamson | 16th September 2016

    What a Beatles documentary has never quite captured is their cultural significance. You can't, not really: it is too tightly bound up in everything we hold as self-evident about popular culture and our relationship with celebrity. Ron Howard, having had the sense to focus his film on the touring years up until 1966 rather than compress The Beatles Anthology into two hours, allows us a window into just how mental those four years were, and gets closer to the truth of it than anyone else has managed.