Across the Universe (12A)

For many people The Beatles music is to be treated like Holy Writ; listened to, revered, and not tampered with in any way.

If for nothing else than her imaginative way with the Beatles songbook, director Julie Taymor deserves a lot of credit for this ambitious film.

It’s a Seventies love story with two attractive leads at its heart. Evan Rachel Wood is Lucy whose boyfriend has been killed in Vietnam, while Jim Sturgess is Jude, a Liverpool docker who has come to America in search of his father.

They meet, they fall in love, and move into a flat in Greenwich Village where everyone seems to be named after a Beatles song. Lucy’s brother, for example, is called Maxell.

The storytelling is pleasant, the way the songs have been used is clever, and inventive and if nothing else the film survives contentedly on the sheer catchiness of the music.