Here's what critics are saying about the latest Beatles documentary:
‘Beatles ’64’ Review: Disney+’s Illuminating Fab Four Doc Captures the Crucible Moment of the Band’s First U.S. Visit - Hollywood Reporter
Tedeschi’s film is a declaration of love for the Beatles, but what distinguishes it is its curiosity about the America of that time, beyond the bubble of the four Scousers who can hardly believe they’re drinking cocktails in Miami.
Beatles ‘64 Reviewed: Uneven take on Fabs’ first visit to the US - Mojo
There are two films vying for attention in David Tedeschi’s Beatles ’64. One is a thrilling verité document of the Fab Four’s journey across America during fourteen days in February of that year and the other is a more ideologically confused affair; a talking-heads documentary about the impact Lennon, McCartney, Harrisonand Starr had on the regular Americans who witnessed them, and how, in some way, The Beatles were a much-needed balm, a message of love and innocence for a country still coming to terms with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy less than three months earlier.
Beatles ’64 review – Fab Four radiate an inexhaustible, almost supernatural energy - The Guardian
As ever, the four faces of the Beatles glow with incredulous bafflement and joy at the surreal storm swirling around them; they radiate an inexhaustible, almost supernatural energy, cracking wise and laughing, and apparently never in a bad mood with the cameras that are forever being shoved in their faces. They are good-tempered and bemused by the New York radio DJ Murray Kaufman, or Murray the K, who had somehow managed to fluke his way into hanging out with them in their hotel room, and no one quite knows who allowed him to do this. The film gives us some great closeups of the band’s faces while they are playing – I’d never noticed before that George sometimes briefly appeared to zone out on stage.
Beatles ’64: Martin Scorsese achieves the impossible – he makes the Beatles boring - The Telegraph
A movie about the Beatles that opens with two minutes of speeches by President Kennedy while contemporary pop star Billie Eilish sings a mournfully sad version of All My Loving is already taking itself way too seriously.
The film is mainly enlivened by raw 16mm cinéma-vérité footage shot by the late Albert and David Maysles for their contemporaneous documentary What’s Happening: The Beatles in the USA. It has been cleaned up sonically and visually with techniques developed for Peter Jackson’s blockbuster 2021 Beatles documentary Get Back, but I am not convinced that its recontextualisation offers an improvement on the original.
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. Whether it’s Jamie Bernstein (Leonard’s daughter) talking about how she dragged the family TV into the dining room to watch the Sullivan show, or David Lynch evoking what it is that music like that of the early Beatles does to you, or Betty Friedan, in an old TV clip, speaking with daunting eloquence about how the Beatles incarnated a new vision of masculinity that threw over the old clenched model, these testimonials color in the consuming quality of our collective passion for the Fab Four.
Review: ‘Beatles ’64’ shows an unguarded band stepping into America’s limelight - The Los Angeles Times
Nowadays rock groups are the producers of their own massaged, glossy documentaries — Bruce Springsteen has a “written by” credit on this year’s “Road Diary” — where even the revelations are carefully chosen and measured out. Yet once it was the custom to let cameras in to catch what they might. Out at the Peppermint Lounge, presaging a similar scene in “A Hard Day’s Night,” McCartney and Lennon and a dancing Starr are clearly, happily inebriated; they don’t have their guard up yet, or handlers to get between them and the camera. (The Beatles organization was surprisingly small; you could fit the whole operation in a van.)
Beatles '64 Review: an up close and personal look at an obsession that America still can't shake - Brooklyn Vegan
The last time Disney+ spiced up our Thanksgiving weekend with a look into the lives of The Beatles was in 2021, with Peter Jackson’s eight-hour three-part series The Beatles: Get Back. The less fanatic fans among us may be happy to know that Beatles ’64 flies by in a tight 106 minutes, and what’s even more striking about the contrast between these two films beyond the length is how much had changed for The Beatles themselves in just five years. Get Back dispelled the rumors that The Beatles had become enemies by the time they were writing their final albums Abbey Road and Let It Be by showing how much love still did exist between the Fab Four at that point, but it no doubt has its moments of hostility. By contrast, The Beatles of early 1964 were fresh-faced, wide-eyed friends ready to take on the world together and have the best possible time doing it. The prevailing mood of Beatles ’64 is joy: the joy amongst the members of The Beatles, the joy in the music they were writing at that time, and the joy they brought to the world and America in particular.
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