The Beatles: Get Back – The Rooftop Concert review – a towering time capsule

Nonplussed coppers, 60s London panoramas and the fab four very much alive … Peter Jackson’s film is moving and unmissable

Peter Jackson recently reignited passionate awe with The Beatles: Get Back: his epic, intimate eight-hour TV re-edit of Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s documentary footage for Let It Be, about the recording of the Beatles’ 1970 album. The centrepiece has been released as a standalone event in cinemas – initially in large-format Imax, but now also in conventional theatres. This is the legendary and mysteriously intended rooftop concert, in which the band (with guest keyboardist Billy Preston) played atop the Apple offices in Savile Row, London, in the freezing cold, for stunned or curious observers who had clambered on to the neighbouring roofs, and for the cheerful crowds below.

The cameras captured the event, and the amazing 60s faces of Londoners at street level and up there on the roof: some looking bored, like the indifferent onlookers at Calvary depicted in Jan Van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgement. Most hilariously, there are also the nonplussed coppers – one with a Blakey/Hitler moustache – intent on shutting the whole thing down, who were cheekily being stalled down in reception for as long as possible.