The truth often undercuts the film’s simplistic notions about true love and about friendship.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jun 6, 2022

Get back, get back to where you once belonged, you want to shout. But the movie is stuck in the wrong groove.

| Apr 4, 2018

There's nothing very profound here, but we do at least get a nice handling of period and milieu, and pretty good performances of the songs.

| Sep 10, 2007

What pulls you over the bum spots is the electrifying immediacy.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2007

The early, pre-fame days of the Beatles are a great subject for a film, but the potential has been only partly realized in Backbeat.

Full Review | Sep 10, 2007

The music is loud and raw, but nevertheless evokes the excitement it generated.

| Jan 26, 2006

Iain Softley directs his feature debut with simplicity and feeling, and you don't have to have been a Beatles fan to get with the beat. Gives you hope for the British film industry.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 22, 2005

Backbeat, which for all its pretensions can often be impressively canny and affectionate about its subject, is helped enormously by newly recorded versions of Beatle records.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | May 20, 2003

Historically, we might quibble with the overall sound quality and the fact that the Beatles surely never played their instruments quite this efficiently in 1960 but, once again, what the music captures is its overwhelming appeal.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 1, 2000

Working with a time period and two crucial characters probably not too familiar to less-than-avid Beatles or rock fans, Softley needs a great performance, and he gets it from Hart.

| Jan 1, 2000

Softley is able to enliven a familiar story and famous characters. His cast helps him.

| Jan 1, 2000

At the end, I felt cheated.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Jan 1, 2000

| Original Score: A | Apr 15, 1994