...but The Beatles: Eight Days a Week—The Touring Years plays it smart by selecting a single lane of the Fab Four’s sprawling saga and following it from start to finish. Director Ron Howard’s slick but enjoyable movie focuses on the group solely as a touring and performing entity during the Beatlemania years of the early and mid 1960s. It didn’t take long for John, Paul, George, and Ringo to become fed up with live performances, and the Beatles had switched to a recording-studio-only entity by the release of 1967’s Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
Eight Days a Week focuses on the preceding years, when the group was shuttled from city to city, usually with pandemonium ensuing just outside the limousine windows. It was an era of 20-minute sets in rickety English cinemas and cavernous American sports stadiums—and much of the time the music was completely unheard beneath the deafening shrieks of the fans.