Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Capturing John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr in their electrifying element, 'A Hard Day's Night' is a wildly irreverent journey through this pastiche of a day in the life of The Beatles during 1964. The band have to use all their guile and wit to avoid the pursuing fans and press to reach their scheduled television performance, in spite of Paul's troublemaking grandfather and Ringo's arrest.
A Hard Day's Night is a genuine landmark — Richard Lester's kinetic, hand-held, vérité-influenced style essentially invented the visual language of the pop music film and the music video. The cinematography (Gilbert Taylor and David Watkin) is inventive and energetic, earning a well-above-average mark. Novelty is high because the film is genuinely singular: its irreverent, anarchic tone, the blend of mockumentary and surrealism, and its documentation of Beatlemania make it unmistakably one-of-a-kind. The Beatles themselves are naturally charismatic and witty, but the acting is solid rather than exceptional — they play exaggerated versions of themselves. The plot is deliberately thin and episodic, functional rather than remarkable. The ending resolves pleasantly but without great dramatic weight.