Am I allowed to publish reviews submitted for courses in open-access journals? Question is rather self explanatory. 

I understand that the article was submitted within the context of a course within the university, but it is nonetheless my intellectual property. I also generally cannot seem to get a clear answer from the university's staff.

Generally, is it acceptable and legal to submit an article or review submitted within the context of a course to a journal for publication?
I cannot see anything in general that could prevent you from submitting a report written in a course to a journal. There are of course several issues you need to be aware of. First, did you do the entire work yourself from coming up with the idea through researching the topic and writing? You need to look if someone else's "intellectual property" is involved. Second, you do not state under what circumstances your report was written. Submitting a manuscript to a journal involves meeting certain standards so under what I would consider normal circumstances, course reports would not be in shape for publication. One obvious reason for this is that reviews typically involves reading and summarizing/synthesizing a very large number of papers, work that cannot fit into the short time span of a course. So, in general, I doubt the scenario you describe would work without significant extra work. I have no doubts the core of a useful paper can be achieved within a course format but from there to publication is a different story. So without additional details, it is difficult to assess the likely success but the principle stands, yes it is acceptable and legal as long as the work adheres to general publication ethics.