Screen Time: Episode 72 - A Hard Day's Night: 27.09.26
An hour's worth of stuff we consider to be worth your time when it comes to your relationship with screens.
This week on Screen Time, we’re heading back to peak Beatlemania for our Featured Soundtrack, as A Hard Day’s Night reminds us that pointing a camera at four young Liverpudlians while they were busy changing popular culture was a remarkably good idea.
We look at how Richard Lester captured The Beatles’ humour and chaos, why those musical sequences helped lay the groundwork for the modern music video, and revisit an album stuffed rather irritatingly with songs Lennon and McCartney wrote while barely into their twenties.
At the cinema, things become considerably less wholesome. Zach Cregger’s Resident Evil has infected its way straight to the top of the Kinepolis Luxembourg chart, finally knocking Spider-Man from number one, and we give Cregger’s visually inventive but familiar zombie adventure three and a half stars. Meanwhile, Gal Gadot’s *The Runner earns just two, although its bonkers plotting, hyperactive visual effects and complete disregard for normal human behaviour make it considerably more entertaining than that rating might suggest.
We also preview Whalefall, man gets swallowed by whale, has understandably difficult afternoon, and Aaron Sorkin’s Facebook follow-up The Social Reckoning.
Elsewhere, Benedict Cumberbatch gets dangerous for Guy Ritchie, David Corenswet swaps Superman’s cape for NFL shoulder pads in Mr. Irrelevant, and Gizmo makes a very brief return as Gremlins 3 finally creeps towards cinemas.
On streaming, Jessica Chastain’s long-delayed The Savant escapes the shelf, Black Doves prepares Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw for another round of espionage and murder, and Disney explains why its supposedly ad-free Disney+ tiers may occasionally contain things that look suspiciously like adverts.
And in gaming, Bungie discovers that Destiny 2 apparently wasn’t finished after all, KPop Demon Hunters continues its campaign to occupy every available corner of popular culture via Monopoly Go!, and Apocalyptica bring four cellos and an unreasonable amount of noise to Control: Resonant.
Add Show Tunes, our Kinepolis ticket giveaway and a Godfather Fun Film Fact involving Marlon Brando and one extremely contented stray cat, and that’s Episode 72 of Screen Time, available on RTL Play.
