Awards Season, Reviews / 29.09.2019

It's fairly shameful it's taken us this long for a biopic on a historical figure as important as Harriet Tubman. Practically every other key figure in the Civil War has been covered by cinema, yet not the abolitionist who still inspires people to this day. In fact, the only cinematic appearance of Tubman has been a blink-and-you'll-miss-her role in 2012's Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Yep. That's her current cinematic legacy. The time has finally arrived for Tubman to have her moment on the big screen. Brought to life by...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 28.09.2019

Full disclosure - until last year, I had never heard of Fred Rogers. As someone living in the bubble that is Australia, the unassuming brilliance of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood had somehow never reached our shores. It took Morgan Neville's gorgeous and inspiring 2018 documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? to introduce the magic of Mister Rogers to those of us previously uninitiated. After the documentary provided an intimate insight into both the public and private lives of Rogers, there seemed no need for a full-scale biopic. Thankfully, that's entirely...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 18.09.2019

Cinema has been showing us the ugly side of divorce for decades now. Whether it's brutally on display in something like Kramer vs. Kramer or deceptively hidden in a film like Mrs. Doubtfire, the collapse of a marriage is only further complicated when children are involved. Saturated with intimate pain no doubt elicited from his own divorce, writer/director Noah Baumbach offers a deeply personal work with Marriage Story; one of the year's finest films and one of the most emotional experiences you will have in a cinema in...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 13.09.2019

An origin story of Batman's greatest foe was something no one ever really asked for. Much like Disney's ill-fated attempt to flesh out the backstory of one of its greatest villains in Maleficent, the Joker is a character whose mystery is part of his endless charm. He's a character we can never fully understand. Nor should we seek to. So seemingly indiscriminate in his chaos, his brand of evil was perfectly summarised by Michael Caine's Alfred in The Dark Knight when he theorised, "Some men just want to...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 11.09.2019

Renée! Renée! Renée! Does Judy! Judy! Judy! You'd be hard-pressed to find a better project for an absent Hollywood star to make her triumphant comeback than by tackling the most ambitious role of her career. In a twist of meta-laced irony, it's a character Renée Zellweger can clearly identify with. Chewed up and spat out by the industry that made her a household name, Zellweger obviously connects with a thing or two about the experiences of the legendary Judy Garland. In a heartbreaking look at the troubled final days of the Hollywood...

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Uncategorized / 10.09.2019

With so many films and so little time, the need for capsule reviews become a necessity for us film critics to survive a film festival. As such, here are a handful of films The Jam Report was lucky to catch at the Toronto International Film Festival. Hala American cinema rarely touches on the lives of the roughly 3.5 million Muslims who call the United States home. While the days of Muslims only appearing on-screen as damaging stereotypes are thankfully behind us, there is still a glaring lack of films that...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 10.09.2019

There is one golden rule of comedy; either everything is fair game or nothing is. But there are those who consider there to be a few exceptions to this rule (which, in itself, is the definition of an oxymoron). To some, the Nazism movement of the late 1930s seems to be off-limits when it comes to comedy, despite the fact Adolf Hitler has been satirised for decades by The Three Stooges, Walt Disney, Looney Tunes, Mel Brooks, and, perhaps most famously, Charlie Chaplin. By expertly satirising something, you remove...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 09.09.2019

If there was one inclusion on the Toronto Film Festival schedule this year that stood out as an intriguing addition, it was undoubtedly Hustlers; a film which, on its surface, appears like something more at home in a summer blockbuster season than amongst a litany of awards season hopefuls. With its ensemble female cast stacked with big names of both the film and music world and a narrative centred on the exploits of a group of strippers, you may be expecting a film devoid of any substance. You'd be...

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Awards Season, Reviews / 08.09.2019

Most of us were likely begrudgingly subjected to reading the work of Charles Dickens in our school years. And cinema sure has mined most of his bibliography since the dawn of the medium. His semi-autobiographical work David Copperfield has itself been adapted numerous times over the years, most notably MGM's big-budget 1935 adaptation, which scored three Oscar noms including Best Picture. It begs the question of why offer up yet another incarnation of this classic tale. Enter writer/director Armando Iannucci to serve up one of the year's most delightful treats...

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Reviews / 05.09.2019

Everybody loves a clown. After 2017's It shockingly became the highest-grossing horror film of all time, we all knew a sequel wouldn't be far away, particularly after the words "Chapter One" flashed on-screen during the closing credits. With its 1980s nostalgia, a winning ensemble cast of youngsters, and a menacing performance from Bill Skarsgard, the film deserved every dollar it raked in at the box office. Just two years later, it's time to head back to Derry where Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Skarsgard) is set to unleash a whole...

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