‘If These Walls Could Sing’ Film Review: Abbey Road Studio Gets a Slight, Sunny Tribute

thewrap.com:

If you’re a fan of a particular era of British rock ’n’ roll, this is the right year to be at the Telluride Film Festival. The festival’s opening day brought onetime photographer Anton Corbijn’s “Squaring the Circle,” which looked at the rock design company Hipgnosis through memories from Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Roger Waters, Noah Gallagher and many others.

And it was followed the next afternoon by onetime photographer Mary McCartney’s “If These Walls Could Sing,” which looks at London’s Abbey Road recording studio through memories from, oh, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page, Roger Waters, Noah Gallagher and many others.While “Squaring the Circle” comes from a photographer and video director who has made several other feature films in the past, including “Control” and “A Most Wanted Man,” “If These Walls Could Sing” is the directorial debut from McCartney, who nonetheless comes to the job with a real insider’s perspective: Her father is, of course, Paul McCartney, and she’s been coming to the studio made famous by her dad’s band since she was a baby.In addition to McCartney, Page, Waters and Gallagher, the film also includes interviews with Elton John, Ringo Starr, Celeste, John Williams, Cliff Richard, George Lucas, Kanye West and Giles Martin, the last of whom meant that the daughter of Beatle Paul McCartney was interviewing and filming the son of Beatles producer George Martin.With all the family connections, you’d expect “If These Walls Could Sing” to be affectionate, and it is.

Mary McCartney celebrates Abbey Road studio to the point where a couple of sequences in the film feel as if they could have been lifted from a promotional video, and she largely avoids the rockier stretches when the studio changed hands and.