film

The latest treat dished up by Cine Verdi in its long-running, music-focused Friday-night Verdi Club series is Ron Howard’s The Beatles: Eight Days a Week – The Touring Years, which revisits the brief, intense period between 1962 and 1966 when the band went from Liverpool outsiders to the most famous group on the planet. Rather than recounting the band's familiar origin story, the film focuses on the physical reality of constant touring: endless travel, deafening crowds and the near-impossible task of making music amid the absolute chaos of Beatlemania. Seen through this lens, the phenomenon becomes visceral rather than nostalgic.

Drawing on never-before-seen concert footage and candid archival material, the documentary captures in real time four young men on a crash course in surviving their own success. Howard gives space to the personalities behind the myth, while Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr’s present-day reflections add warmth and perspective without tipping into sentimentality. A brilliant portrait of a moment in time and a band running on adrenaline and camaraderie.