The vast, delirious joke of W.D. Richter’s sci-fi comedy... is that it plays like the 189th issue of a comic book that actually has no prior issues.

| Jan 22, 2025

Unmistakably tongue-in-cheek, the movie follows Buckaroo (Peter Weller) to the frontier of ultra-hip sci-fi parody. John Lithgow gets a chance to pull out all the stops as a mad scientist, and when things are funny they’re very much so.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 5, 2022

Too wacky and spaced out for its own good.

| Jul 21, 2022

The movie makes such large demands on one’s powers of concentration and yet, when all of its threads have been followed and its oddities assimilated, all one is left with is a junk construction.

| May 2, 2022

Dense and complex, this beloved 1984 cult film hits the ground running with its text-based prelude and just doesn't stop, never making an expected choice or pausing to hold the viewer's figurative hand.

| Sep 8, 2021

It's easy to see the appeal, what with its loopy characters, its loopy plot, and its loopy dialogue -- it's just a shame there's not more lurking underneath all that surface quirk.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Aug 29, 2021

The story is so incredibly bizarre - a mix of pulpy adventure, British-infused science-fiction zaniness, comic book character designs, dry humor, and awkward romance.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Aug 31, 2020

This is a chaotic, notably unfunny science-fiction spoof.

| Jan 5, 2018

Just how much one will be able to jibe with Buckaroo Banzai will hinge on whether or not you're willing to buy into the movie's unabashed lunacy.

| Feb 28, 2017

A one-film franchise that never was, too daft and marvelous to expand any further.

| Original Score: A | Aug 11, 2014

There are fun fripperies to be found on the fringe of "Buckaroo's" free-for-all. But like the bells and whistles of a garish pinball game, they are but momentarily enjoyable distractions on a machine that was destined to tilt from the get-go.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 31, 2014

Off-the-wall and incoherent but colorful and eccentric, this satire, benefiting from a great cast, became a cult item.

| Original Score: C+ | Jul 8, 2011

It's a whole lot of thought put into a movie in which not very much happens.

| Jun 24, 2010

A state-of-the-art spaceship flying at the speed of light without narrative coordinates, Buckaroo Banzai is the very oddest good movie in many a full moon.

| Aug 20, 2008

A genuine cult movie: imaginative and endearingly naff.

| Original Score: 4/5 | May 6, 2008

"Buckaroo Banzai" is like decades of escapist pulp filtered through the skeptic's shrug of the mid-'80s.

| Original Score: A | Mar 3, 2008

Richter's comic genre hybrid comes complete with its own mythology, and team of established superheroes, and is curiously appealing.

| Aug 16, 2007

Punch lines appear without set-ups and set-ups without punch lines. Characters come and go with such bewildering speed that it is virtually impossible to keep track of the story, which jumps around enough to induce motion sickness.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 5, 2007

It violates every rule of storytelling and narrative structure in creating a self-contained world of its own.

| Jun 5, 2007

There's so much going on here and so much fun to be had, I've never really been sure what the plot was.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | May 26, 2006