NEW YORK TIMES: “When he used to be asked how he’d like to be remembered, he said, ‘I don’t care, I don’t care if I’m remembered,’ ” Ms. Harrison said in an interview, affectionately imitating George’s clenched Liverpool accent. “And I really think he meant that. Not in a sarcastic way, but it’s like: Why do you have to be remembered? What’s the big deal?” These many sides of Harrison — the artist and the archivist; the mystic and the mystery — are all on display in a new three-and-a-half-hour documentary, “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” directed by Martin Scorsese. Though the story of the Beatles has been told in many forms before, including in “The Beatles Anthology,” the documentary, record and book series released by Harrison, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney beginning in 1995, “Living in the Material World” is a significant and substantially new take on the band and its most elusive member. It is the first film to center on Harrison, the so-called quiet Beatle, and the first time Mr. Scorsese, whose roster of rock documentaries is gradually rivaling his celebrated résumé of fiction features, has focused on the Beatles. MORE
HOLLYWOOD REPORTER: Opening with fantastic World War II English victory celebration footage that’s new at least to American eyes, the film zooms through the subject’s Liverpool youth (“He was cocky,” one of his brothers avers) to the point where George, at 17, went to play in divey Hamburg clubs with the original configuration of what was to become The Beatles. Wonderfully intimate interviews with Klaus Voorman and, especially, his then-girlfriend Astrid Kirchherr, who took striking early photographs of the lads, bring those grungy, heady days poignantly alive. Then Beatlemania hits, with first-hand descriptions by Ringo Starr providing an inside feel to a cascade of what, again, is not overly familiar footage. Joan Taylor, wife of the group’s press officer, amusingly describes the boys’ first acid trip—done, per Paul, in an environment of “controlled weirdness”–although George claims on an excerpted Dick Cavett Show appearance that they didn’t know they were taking LSD the first time they had it. MORE