A Hard Day’s Night

Directed by Richard Lester in 1964 at the very peak of Beatlemania, A Hard Day's Night set out to cash in quickly on a pop phenomenon and instead became a landmark, earning two Academy Award nominations and reinventing what a musical could be. Shot in crisp black and white over a few frantic weeks, it follows the band through a mock day in their impossibly hectic lives.

John, Paul, George and Ringo play exaggerated versions of themselves, their deadpan Liverpudlian wit carrying scenes that Alun Owen scripted to fit each personality, with Wilfrid Brambell as Paul's troublemaking grandfather. Lester, drawing on the French New Wave and his own background in anarchic television comedy, films the songs and the slapstick with handheld energy, jump cuts and a restless visual invention that effectively created the template for the music video a generation before MTV.

A critical and commercial triumph, it shaped pop cinema for decades and influenced everything from The Monkees to the modern concert film. Joyous, fast and weightless in the very best sense, it preserves the Beatles at the giddy height of their fame, before the world and their own ambitions complicated everything — and it remains one of the most exhilarating films ever made about the simple, fleeting pleasure of being young, gifted and adored — and proof that a quick commercial cash-in could, in the right hands, become lasting art.