Metacritic reviews

The 1978 film musical Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is a mess…but it is a wonderfully fascinating mess, a mother lode of undiluted insanity.

Shorn of its inside references, it's a very mixed bag - pleasant but overlong, funny when Steve Martin is on hand and stultifying when Frankie Howerd goes into his Mean Mr. Mustard routines, full of wonderful music that too rarely reaches the boiling point and pathos that sinks to bathos. [31 Jul 1978, p.42]

The movie may have been conceived in a spirit of merriment, but watching it feels like playing shuffleboard at the absolute insistence of a bossy shipboard social director. When whimsy gets to be this overbearing, it simply isn't whimsy any more.

The music isn't bad, but there's something more than a little blasphemous about hearing She's Leaving Home or A Day in the Life sung by the likes of the Bee Gees.

Like The Star Wars Christmas Special, Sgt. Pepper puts a beloved, ubiquitous cultural institution in a new context so staggeringly, mind-bogglingly inappropriate that it engenders an intense, almost unbearable level of cognitive dissonance.

Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band will attract some grown-up flower children of the 1960s who will soon find the Michael Schultz film to be a totally bubblegum and cotton candy melange of garish fantasy and narcissism.

This crass moral pantomime is plain embarrassing.

Indescribably awful—a serving up of Beatles tunes by Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees with the ugliest visuals imaginable, directed with more glitz than good sense by Michael Schultz.

Pathetic acting and a scattershot plot sink this pitiful attempt by producer Robert Stigwood to turn the landmark Beatles album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band into an engaging film.