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| English: Meryl Streep (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
• End your review with a rating and an indication of the audience at which your review is aimed.
• At the end of the review make clear where the movie can be seen – if it can.
• Do some plot summary but don’t bog down in a description of what happens without adding interpretation of what the action means. This is not a book report.
• Do that standard thing of putting the name of the actor in brackets after the name of the character: Billy Brown (Gary Green). Sometimes it’s interesting to note what other productions actors have appeared in, particularly when past casting suggests that they are “types.” Awards may be worth mentioning.
• Be entertaining. Write snappy and/or provocative leads. Write with the assumption your have to quickly win your reader’s attention.
• Write at least 600 words. For the moment, I continue to set no top limit.
• If, while doing research for some basic information such as other roles an actor has played, you stumble upon some provocative bit of specific information that you want to include in your review as a way of setting up a comment of your own, you would deftly work the source into your review. For instance, if you stumble upon a comment that “Meryl Streep is the most overrated actress of her generation,” you’d mention the source. It might be an obscure blog. It might be a top movie critic. The source would matter. Recently it was President Trump. Wow.
In addition: I love to talk about journalism’s “dirty secrets,” and one of the dirty secrets of reviewing is that more often than not you can use a movie, TV show, a book, a play, a musical performance to talk about whatever it is you want to talk about. Gender relations, parent-child relations, life in the city, male bonding, table manners, fashion choices, dating rituals, sexual etiquette, world peace, good dental hygiene – why not? Okay, sometimes you can go too far, and your review will just seem weird. Also, we are not blind to clues about how a movie’s creator may want us to take it, and we are smart enough to have some idea about how the “average viewer” may take a movie. But how you feel about a movie – what facet of it matters to you at a particular moment in time - is how you feel about it. We read certain critics not for guidance but because we are fascinated by how their mind works, the unique and surprising ways in which they react to something.
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