We believe that The Beatles need no presentation, as they were the most famous music band in the world for a while. This British band made a new sound and meshed it with the unique and changing culture of the ’60s to create songs that are still listened to today. They also did some movies and inspired others to do them with their music. In this piece, we’re not talking about documentaries made after the band separated, but we recommend enormously The Beatles Anthology, Eight Days a Week (one of the best documentaries in Hulu), and Peter Jackson’s Get Back. Let’s sit down, put on your favorite Beatles album (there are no wrong answers), and rank the best movies involving The Beatles.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

9 The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (1978)

     BBC2

Monty Python’s Eric Idle made this mockumentary (long before This is Spinal Tap) parodying The Beatles and their trajectory. The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash has many fun cameos, including Bill Murray, John Belushi, Mick Jagger, Paul Simon, and George Harrison himself. The film also shows that parodying the songs is no easy feat, as they sound simple but are really dense compositions. Not every joke lands, but if you’re a Beatles fan, you’ll laugh at the many inside jokes about their trajectory the script has, showing there’s a lot of love for the Fab Four in this fake documentary.

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY

8 Nowhere Boy (2009)

     Icon Entertainment

John Lennon (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) is a teenager in Liverpool, living with his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas), listening to and playing music, while also trying to have a relationship with his estranged mom Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). Nowhere Boy pictured the life of Lennon when he was still a teenager and all the heartache that made him become a unique, one-in-a-million musician and songwriter, and has Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s best performance ever. It’s a small movie, but it might be a way to understand Lennon a bit more and see when he met Paul McCartney.

7 Magical Mystery Tour (1967)

     Apple Films

Magical Mystery Tour is the strangest movie made by The Beatles. There’s no script; only surreal ideas, many colors, and some musical numbers here and there. It was the biggest moment of the hippie and drugs movement, and it shows. McCartney even said he got the idea from Ken Kasey’s The Merry Pranksters Search For a Cool Place, a hippy bus that toured around America. If you look at the film as an experiment, it works a little better, but it’s obvious this was made without any planning other than “let’s try to film how we feel when we’re on an acid trip”. The surreal imagery is quite good, and they look like they’re having fun. Harrison described it once as “a little home movie”, and looking at it through that lens, it’s a fun document to see where The Beatles (and the world) were in 1967.

6 Yesterday (2019)

     Universal Pictures

Jack (Himesh Patel) is a struggling musician. After he gets into a strange bus accident, he wakes up and discovers a new altered reality, The Beatles never existed, and he’s the only one that remembers them and their songs. So, he starts performing them as if he wrote them and becomes famous. Yesterday is directed by Danny Boyle, and has a fun premise that could’ve been done better, and not only for the typical story of the rise and fall of a musician. Having said that, the songs are great, how they integrate them into the film works, and when the jokes land, they do it incredibly well (the song fight with Ed Sheeran is delightful).

5 Across the Universe (2007)

     Sony Pictures Releasing

Across the Universe tells the love story between Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) in the ’60s through Beatles songs. The movie tells the changes in the roaring ’60s with creative musical numbers using many Beatles covers, while showing love, heartbreak, fun, fear, creativity, the Vietnam War, and everything else that happened in the decade that changed the world. There are all kinds of Easter eggs and homages for Beatles fanatics. The performances by Sturgess and Rachel Wood show the uniqueness of the Brits’ lyrics and feelings behind them, and it even has a small Salma Hayek appearance. This movie is a fun way to spend some time with the Beatles’ music, that’s for sure.

4 Help! (1965)

     United Artists

In theory, Help! is the story of how The Beatles save Ringo Starr (always their biggest star in the movies, no pun intended) from a cult. In reality, this film brought an experimental approach, technicolor, and locations where the musicians would’ve traveled anyway, like the Bahamas or the Alps. The film has some surreal moments and good jokes, but it’s especially known for the creation of colored, visually fun, video clips that showed how great the album was. Some even say, Help! Is the film that invented MTV, maybe that’s a bridge too far, but what haven’t the Beatles inspired?

3 Let It Be (1970)

The material from the Let it Be sessions has become the basis for Peter Jackson’s Get Back, but it’s fascinating to see this version, as a fly-on-the-wall, created and edited when The Beatles were starting to crumble and break. It’s impossible to condense a month of footage in less than two hours, so Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary has to paint with an incredible big brush. Still, we get the concert on the roof, how the band worked in the studio, and the confrontation between Harrison and McCartney.

George Harrison said to Entertainment Tonight: “There’s scenes in it, like on the roof, that was quite good, and there were bits and pieces that’s okay, but most of it just makes me so aggravated that I can’t watch it. Because it was a particularly bad experience that we were having at that time, and… it’s bad enough when you’re having it, let alone having it filmed and recorded so that you’ve got to watch it for the rest of your life. I don’t like it.” After the release of Get Back, it might be fun to watch this one first and see what they changed for dramatic effect.

2 Yellow Submarine (1968)

In Yellow Submarine, The Beatles must save Pepperland from the evil Meanies through music. That’s the plot, but this film is much more. The Beatles were always trying artistic new things, and this animated movie might be one of their best, as it influenced many generations of animators (and probably still does). Yellow Submarine is a visual feast, visually stunning, using the psychedelic style to create groundbreaking animation. Obviously, the music is great, and this film has become the easiest entry for kids into the band’s oeuvre.

1 A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

A Hard Day’s Night shows a fictional day of The Beatles at the peak of Beatlemania, in a youthful, energetic, and vital movie. The band did two smart things that make this movie still relevant today: hiring Alun Owen to write the script and hang out with him, so he could pick up their personalities and accentuate them (Lennon the sarcastic, McCartney the charmer, Harrison the silent, cynical one, and Starr the clown) creating a rather clever movie. The other was hiring Richard Lester as the director. Lester shared the same funny bone as the Liverpudlians and made a movie that followed how the band felt back then: irreverent, a touch surreal, innovative, energetic, fun, and also famous. Director Steven Soderbergh wrote in Getting Away With It: “It was sort of happenstance, the planets lining up with the perfect filmmaker to capture it," Soderbergh says. “That’s really what’s happening: He’s capturing something as opposed to staging it.”

Be it a movie influenced by The Beatles or acted by them, there’s no denying that they made an incredible mark in pop culture and their songs are still some of the best ever created.