The Best Movies Made About (or With) the Beatles

The Beatles: Get Back (2021)​

For my money, this is the gold standard of Beatles documentaries, hands down. Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, 64, went back to the mothballed archives of the 1969 Let It Be studio sessions, restored the nearly 50-year-old footage, and reedited it into this three-part series for Apple TV. It’s astonishing on several levels. For starters, it’s a counterweight to the 1970 doc Let It Be, which shaped the exact same footage into a wildly different (and more conflict-heavy) narrative. Second, it gives us a chance to see the lads acting like a band again, whether that means cracking jokes together or creating classic songs on the fly like they can read one another’s minds. And third, it’s a chance to experience their great rooftop farewell performance again … and you can never watch that too many times. A must-see.

Watch it: The Beatles: Get Back

McCartney 3, 2, 1 (2021)

This riveting documentary became an instant hit when it was released on Hulu during the pandemic. It’s an intimate, nostalgically cozy and enlightening miniseries of interviews between Paul McCartney and shaggy-bearded record producer Rick Rubin, 62, about how some of the Beatles’ most famous (and some more obscure) songs were created. Rubin is clearly a smitten fan, and his questions are softballs, but he understands music, and that allows McCartney to go deeper into talking about the nuts and bolts of the craft than he usually does. McCartney 3, 2, 1 consists of six brief episodes. You’ll wish there were 600 of them. It’s as addictive as it is revelatory.​

Watch it: McCartney 3, 2, 1

The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years (2016)​

Directed by Ron Howard, 71, this documentary focuses on the Beatles’ early, breakneck-paced touring years: the insane, shrieking mobs that met them at airports around the world, the baseball stadiums roaring so loud they couldn’t hear what their bandmates were playing and the royalty they offended by refusing to dine with them on their days off. Since this doc is about their live years, it obviously concentrates on the exhausting early period (the Beatles gave up playing live when it became personally unrewarding, choosing to focus on broadening their sound in the studio). This archival footage provides a fascinating time capsule of an era when they were the biggest sensation on the planet. ​

Watch it: The Beatles: Eight Days a Week — The Touring Years

Good Ol’ Freda (2013)​

This is a wonderful film about one of the most unexplored footnotes in the Beatles saga. This quirky documentary tells the stranger-than-fiction story of Freda Kelly, once a shy 17-year-old girl from Liverpool who was hired by Beatles manager Brian Epstein to answer the Fab Four’s fan mail as their secretary. In other words, Kelly was basically living out every teenage girl’s dream in the early ’60s. This is an affectionate profile of a woman who’s now a grandmother looking back at her strange brush with history as it was being made, told by someone who got to know the boys up close. Kelly, 80, was (and still is) a fan, and her tales of snipping off locks of her bosses’ hair to mail to their admirers couldn’t be more charming.​

Watch it: Good Ol’ Freda

George Harrison: Living in the Material World (2011)​

Martin Scorsese, 83, has made several fantastic music documentaries (The Last Waltz, Bob Dylan: No Direction Home), but this deep-dive biography of the Beatles’ quiet, seeking guitarist certainly belongs near the top. Harrison always seemed like a wallflower next to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, 83, but Scorsese’s up-close-and-personal scrapbook on the man reveals a complicated soul and a musician who was as insatiable for personal enlightenment as he was for the perfect hook. Thanks to Scorsese’s empathetic camera, Harrison (who died in 2001) finally gets his due here.​

Watch it: George Harrison: Living in the Material World

The Beatles Anthology (1995)​

Aired on ABC in 1995 as a marketing tie-in with the CD compilation of the same name, this documentary is actually a lot more revealing than anyone had any right to expect, thanks to fresh interviews with Paul, George and Ringo. If you’re a Beatles obsessive, most of these behind-the-scenes stories will be familiar (McCartney, in particular, seems incapable of telling an uncanned anecdote), but they feel new coming from the horses’ mouths. The surviving members relive their wild early days in Hamburg, the joylessness of performing to shrieking crowds at the height of their pop fame, and the creative renaissance they had in the studio, where they could expand their sound and their ambitions. A new episode of this docuseries was added in 2025, but it doesn’t eveal much. Fortunately, the rest is so good, it doesn’t have to. ​

Watch it: The Beatles Anthology

Best Beatles Biopics

Nowhere Boy (2009)

​This feature film about John Lennon’s troubled early life stars Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the rebellious teenage Liverpudlian. Growing up under the care of his working-class aunt, Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas, 65), Lennon attempts to forge a connection with his estranged mother, desperate to have a real relationship with her. While she does introduce him to music, she is unable to become the mother that he wants and needs. It’s hard to say how close to the truth Nowhere Boy falls, but Johnson gives a terrific performance, and the film remains a heartbreaking and enlightening glimpse into Lennon’s personality and the demons that would haunt him throughout his all-too-brief life.​

Watch it: Nowhere Boy

Backbeat (1994)​

Long unavailable on streaming, this beautiful and moving feature focuses on the brotherly friendship between John Lennon (Ian Hart, 61) and bass guitarist Stuart Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorff, 52) in an early, pre-fame, 1960 incarnation of the Beatles. In Hamburg, Germany, as the band is buzz-sawing through multiple shows each night trying to climb to the next level, the introspective Sutcliffe falls in love with a local photographer (Sheryl Lee, 58), which leads him to choose her (and his painting) over his mates and celebrity. The rest, as they say, is history. As for Sutcliffe, he would tragically pass away in obscurity in 1962 at age 21.

Watch it: Backbeat

Best Movies Starring the Beatles

A Hard Day’s Night (1964)

​From the very first scene, when the title song’s famous opening claaang! guitar chord strikes and the baby-faced foursome are being chased by a mob of rabid teenage girls, Richard Lester’s exuberant black-and-white slapstick comedy gives us our first look at how these young men captured the world’s imagination. You already know the songs (they’re still amazing), but what the movie reveals today, more than any other document of its era, is how the Fab Four gave birth to a sort of youthquake the world had never witnessed before — and how mad it felt to be trapped in the eye of its frenzied hurricane. An absolute classic.

Watch it: A Hard Day’s Night

Help! (1965)​

The Beatles’ second feature film introduces color … and drugs. Help! is a much trippier, looser and more experimental chronicle of a band that had achieved overnight fame and were here to stay. Unshackled by the straitjackets of their record label and image Svengalis, the Beatles were allowed to be themselves and let down their hair (although not as thoroughly as they would in the freak-flag-flying late ’60s). Filmed during a string of busman’s holidays in the Bahamas and the Austrian Alps, director Lester’s sophomore Beatles outing is ostensibly about the boys trying to save Ringo from a pair of sinister cult members. But never mind the plot: Help! is a wacky, joyous, sun-dappled mess with a killer soundtrack.

​Watch it: Help!

Best Movies Inspired by the Beatles

Yesterday (2019)​

This is one of those wonderful “what if” films. Directed by Danny Boyle, 69, this musical fantasy stars Himesh Patel as Jack, a struggling singer-songwriter in an English seaside town who gets into a freak bus accident and wakes up to discover that the Beatles never existed. So he decides to start performing their songs (including the classic title track), claim them as his own and rocket to fame. Granted, if you buy that premise, you’ll buy anything. But feel-good movies rarely come with better soundtracks — regardless of who’s taking credit for the songs.​

Watch it: Yesterday