37
Metascore
8 reviews · Provided by Metacritic.com
- 89Austin ChronicleAustin ChronicleNeil Diamond isn't the best actor, and the 1980 version of The Jazz Singer doesn't have the best script, but this movie (love on the) rocks nonetheless.
- 60Chicago ReaderDave KehrChicago ReaderDave KehrNeil Diamond's remake of the 1927 Jolson vehicle isn't very good, but neither is it the vacuous, sentimental ego trip it's been painted as.
- 30NewsweekDavid AnsenNewsweekDavid AnsenOne look at[Neil Diamond's] conspicuously coiffed hair-do and spotlight-glazed eyes and you know this man has been assimilated years ago, probably at Caesars Palace...Richard Fleischer directed this twaddle, using so many yellow filters it looks as if jaundice had set in. [5 Jan 1981, p.55]
- 30Washington PostGary ArnoldWashington PostGary ArnoldSuch a half-baked, arbitrary update that the decrepit plot seems to arise from the misty region of a kind of Jewish Brigadoon in contemporary Manhattan, a Ghetto That Time Forgot. [20 Dec 1980, p.D3]
- 30The New York TimesJanet MaslinThe New York TimesJanet MaslinThis movie has nothing but foolishness to carry it along. At least it is foolishness that pretends, however unsuccessfully, to be grand. [19 Dec 1980, p.C18]
- 25Chicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertChicago Sun-TimesRoger EbertThe Jazz Singer has so many things wrong with it that a review threatens to become a list. Let me start with the most obvious: This movie is about a man who is at least 20 years too old for such things to be happening to him. The Jazz Singer looks ridiculous giving us Neil Diamond going through an adolescent crisis.
- 25TV Guide MagazineTV Guide MagazineNeil Diamond (who even reverts to Al Jolson's blackface for one sequence) is wholly unbelievable as the cantor's son who forsakes the synagogue for the bright lights of pop music.