Recensioni de* critic*

It would be impossible to recreate the moment of the Beatles' advent, but Ron Howard's "The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years" does a great job chronicling that singular breakthrough... In focusing on the years when the band became the first ever to mount several world-spanning tours, it offers two things at once: a history of the Beatles during the years of their initial success; and a tribute to the group's powers as a live act.

Frantically rushing through the quartet's prodigious output during these years, Eight Days a Week is best when it slows down, allowing a performance of, say, "I Feel Fine" to be heard and seen in full, rather than interrupting these soaring melodies so that Malcolm Gladwell can redundantly discuss "the emergence of teenage culture."

It may take a softer, more superficial approach when compared to Martin Scorsese's lengthy George Harrison doc, Living In The Material World (2011), or the Anthology project. And its assembly of talking heads can be perplexingly random. But calling out from the past in 5.1 surround sound – a world away from the tannoy system in Shea Stadium in 1965 – this infectious piece harks back to happier, sweeter times for the Beatles and for pop music in general.

The film does, to its credit, gradually capture the growing sense of fame-induced panic and ennui that prompted the Liverpudlians' premature retreat from live performance, just as their music began to rock that little bit harder. But it comes as little surprise that Howard — a nimble and proficient storyteller in nonfiction and fiction alike, who previously helmed the Jay-Z concert pic "Made in America" — hasn't a natural documentarian's drive for information.