Double Feature

A Hard Day’s Night

Meet the Beatles! Just one month after they exploded onto the U.S. scene with their Ed Sullivan Show appearance, John, Paul, George, and Ringo began working on a project that would bring their revolutionary talent to the big screen. A Hard Day’s Night, in which the bandmates play cheeky comic versions of themselves, captured the astonishing moment when they officially became the singular, irreverent idols of their generation and changed music forever. Directed with raucous, anything-goes verve by Richard Lester and featuring a slew of iconic pop anthems, including the title track, “Can’t Buy Me Love,” “I Should Have Known Better,” and “If I Fell,” A Hard Day’s Night, which reconceived the movie musical and exerted an incalculable influence on the music video, is one of the most deliriously entertaining movies of all time. (Janus Films)

I Wanna Hold Your Hand

It’s 1964, Beatlemania is sweeping the nation and six teenage superfans from New Jersey are headed to the Big Apple in hopes of catching the Fab Four in person – and they’re not gonna let anything get in their way. In his directorial debut, Robert Zemeckis (with co-writer Bob Gale and producer Steven Spielberg) meticulously crafts a madcap motion picture comedy pulsing with pure excitement and energetic glee. Packed with a wall-to-wall soundtrack of the Beatles greatest hits, it’s deliriously propulsive but hilariously held together by the strength of its young cast (including Nancy Allen, Theresa Saldana, Wendie Jo Sperber and Eddie Deezen).

“I Wanna Hold Your Hand re-creates precisely the excitement the Beatles let loose 14 years ago; it transports the audience back to the eye of a phenomenal social hurricane.” – Frank Rich, TIME Magazine

“The gimmick behind I Wanna Hold Your Hand is the fact that you never actually see the Beatles; the genius of the film is the fact that you never miss them.” – Janet Maslin, The New York Times