The Jazz Singer

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Claire D It is a brilliant film. Yes it is of its age (there are parts that wouldn't be ok nowadays) But it is absolutely worth watching and the soundtrack is amazing Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 04/10/25 Full Review Rob A For all it's faults (i.e. dubious acting, dubious writing and a blackface scene for the love of God) if you're old enough to like Neil Diamond you've probably seen this more than once - I know I have. There's also a prescient element to the big finale; a reminder of sorts applicable to just about all of us: "Everywhere around the world, they come to America. Everytime that flag's unfurled, they come to America. Got a dream to take them there, they come to America!" We are great because of it. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/20/25 Full Review Devra B I love this movie—I don’t care what the critics say. The music is SO good, and sure it’s a little bit 80s campy, but I wasn’t bored for even one second. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 11/22/24 Full Review Dave B For the time, it was a decent movie with an ending that rocked and introduced a song that was played at July 4th gatherings for years after, including major gatherings such as the NYC seaport. It's hard to minimize that kind of impact. Like many movies of the period, including Fame, Flash Dance, Rocky, it was about dreams coming true on a very public level, and, at the time, it seemed to work. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 05/31/23 Full Review brent t Listening to soundtrack today and recalling the movie. So looked up and saw that idiots at RT panned this... and summarized Sir Laurence Olivier as being campy here. Not a 5***** movie... sure. But really good. And Neil Diamond perfectly played the part. It's a musical... and the music is moving, well written and classic Neil Diamond (entertaining). Mostly... an uplifting movie. Something critics and Hollywood disdains. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member The Jazz Singer isn't even accurate because Yussel/Jess (Neil Diamond) doesn't perform jazz music, but rather rock music just like what Neil Diamond does in real life. Bad acting from Neil Diamond who is very flat and wooden, Laurence Olivier was some kind of weird caricature of a Jewish cantor, and Catlin Adams was just cheesy. The writing was pretty lazy because characters change personalities and no character arcs occur whatsoever. To top it all off, The Jazz Singer featured blackface like the 1927 version but the practice had already been deemed racist around 1980. Come on now. The 1980 version of The Jazz Singer completely ruins the charm of the original 1927 classic by nearly removing what made the old 20's film so important to cinema history, by making it full voiced with sound as oppose to half of it being silent and the other half being fully voiced with synced sound, and having the Jazz music be replaced with Rock music, which is just unnecessarily modernizing the film to be more accepting of the 80s, which is just horrible and disrespectful to the legacy of Alan Crossland and his work. This film right here is why people usually hate remakes because it messes with the original in a very poor manner. Rated 1/5 Stars •  Rated 1 out of 5 stars 02/18/23 Full Review Read all reviews

The Jazz Singer

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