Across the Universe

Across the Universe (2007) is a musical drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Julie Taymor and starring Jim Sturgess and Evan Rachel Wood. A young dockworker from Liverpool crosses the Atlantic in 1968 looking for his father. America he finds instead: Greenwich Village bohemia, campus riots, draft notices and a girl named Lucy whose brother doesn't come home from Vietnam.

Thirty-three Beatles songs carry the story — from "I Want to Hold Your Hand" to "Come Together" — each recontextualised to fit a specific emotional beat rather than just play in the background. The cast includes Joe Anderson, Dana Fuchs and T.V. Carpio, with Bono and Eddie Izzard in brief appearances. Taymor, the stage director behind Broadway's The Lion King, shot across the US, the UK and Puerto Rico, layering the musical numbers with period-inflected surrealism.

The film is a love story set inside a country at war with itself, and the Beatles catalogue becomes both its soundtrack and its argument. Watch Across the Universe (2007) online on iFILM.