Reviews / 21.03.2020

One of the biggest film casualties of the Harvey Weinstein sexual assault scandal has been Alfonso Gomez-Rejon's The Current War; a lavish period biopic which was surely due to be Weinstein's great big Oscar hope of the 2017 season. After premiering at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival to a tepid response, Gomez-Rejon was furiously re-editing the film so as to meet its November theatrical release date when the Weinstein story broke. When The Weinstein Company naturally collapsed and the film was pulled from release, Gomez-Rejon raised an additional...

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Reviews / 03.03.2020

By virtue of unfortunate comparison to Pixar's impeccable back catalogue of masterpieces, every new film from the studio faces a dauntingly high bar to clear. Last year, Toy Story 4 somehow managed to defy all expectations and walk off with the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature in the process. Sadly, Pixar's first of two films this year can't quite meet the dazzling pedigree of many of its contemporaries. While it's naturally wonderful to see Pixar return to fully original storytelling for the first time in three years, the...

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Reviews / 25.02.2020

In an era of remakes that do little more than slap a new coat of paint on a well-known story, you approach something like a reimagining of The Invisible Man with immense trepidation. Thankfully, this is one remodel that deftly proves its necessity. By flipping the narrative focus away from its titular character, writer/director Leigh Whannell offers a fresh take on H. G. Wells' 1897 novel that's as thrilling and terrifying as it is shrewdly relevant. With yet another impressive performance by Elisabeth Moss at its helm, The Invisible...

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Reviews / 18.02.2020

It's been over 115 years since Jack London released his classic wilderness adventure The Call of the Wild; a book most of us were likely forced to read during our early school years. After several big-screen adaptations over the last few decades, it's time to dust off the novel once again with 20th Century Studios (so long, Fox) offering another take on London's work. Given CGI photorealistic animals are all the rage nowadays, director Chris Sanders makes the confounding call to make his canine star Buck a completely computer-generated...

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Reviews / 13.02.2020

After bursting onto the horror movie scene back in 2009 with runaway hit Paranormal Activity, Blumhouse Productions has proven itself a major player in the genre. But for every spectacular success like the Oscar-winning Get Out and Insidious, they've also served up some absolute disasters like Ouija and Truth or Dare. In a curious move, Jeff Wadlow, director of the latter film, is being given another shot with Blumhouse's latest reimagining, Fantasy Island. Taking mild inspiration from Aaron Spelling's 1977 television series of the same name (which, let's be...

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Reviews / 13.02.2020

April 30, 2019. The day the internet savaged the first trailer of Sonic the Hedgehog so viciously, the video was quickly pulled from YouTube and the film's release date was pushed back to allow for the title character to be completely (and rightly) redesigned. Now the day has arrived when we see if this unprecedented move has paid off. Given this calamitous backstory, it's a miracle the final product isn't quite the disaster you may be expecting. While it's far from a truly great film and serves up barely...

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Reviews / 12.02.2020

With six world premieres, 93 Australian premieres and 12 Sydney premieres across 57 feature-length films, Queer Screen's annual Mardi Gras Film Festival returns to Sydney for its 27th year. Under the banner of "Emerge. Evolve. Fly.," the program features another spectacular line-up of LGBTQ+ films sure to enlighten, challenge, move, entertain, and dazzle Sydney audiences. With dramas, comedies, documentaries, animated films, and everything else in between, there's something for everyone this year. Here are eight films The Jam Report highly recommends form part of your viewing schedule. 5B For those too...

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Awards Season, Opinion / 10.02.2020

Around this time each year, The Jam Report generally releases an Oscars recap, under the guise of "the good, the bad, and the ugly" of this year's awards. While there were a few confounding moments (I'm still attempting to determine what exactly Eminem was doing there), it's impossible to craft this piece on a ceremony which ended in such spectacular fashion. If anything truly bad or ugly happened this year, none of it really matters anymore. Bong Joon-Ho won Best Director. Parasite won Best Picture. And an embarrassing 92-year...

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Awards Season, Opinion / 09.02.2020

Well, the big day is almost upon us and one of the shortest awards seasons in recent history comes to a close with the 92nd Academy Awards. Once again, we don't have an unassailable frontrunner for Best Picture, which is always rather exciting. It doesn't help prognosticators make their final predictions, but you just have to throw your hat in the ring and hope for the best. It's not just Best Picture that's up in the air. Many of the below-the-line tech categories are also difficult to predict, particularly...

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Awards Season, Opinion / 06.02.2020

With a spectacular line-up of nominees, picking the winners for The Sixth Annual Jammies has been an arduous task. The temptation to take the easy path with a tie in several categories was mighty high, but you won't find any draws here. Awards need winners and painful decisions must be made. So without further ado, let the 6th Annual Jammies commence! Biggest Surprise And the nominees were: Crawl Dora and the Lost City of Gold Fighting With My Family Hustlers The Peanut Butter Falcon Ready or Not And the winner is...

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