Yesterday

 

Director Danny Boyle's hummably insightful morality tale, Yesterday, is a sure starmaker for amiable Hamish Patel, who plays a struggling Suffolk strummer who wakes after an accident during a worldwide blackout the only person who knows the Beatles songbook. He wouldn't! He does! He begins performing the songs, claiming them as his own, gets noticed by the recording industry machine and off he goes. But Boyle isn't only making statements about an individual's struggle with truth and authenticity but, as has also been reflected in his previous films, the unpredicatbility of LIFE, and how we all are accountable for our choices despite what the universe tosses at us. Like most of us, Patel's Jack Malick is not a bad person; he's just blessed, like most of us, with an abiding ordinariness -- and maybe that should be enough.