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21 May 09 Elements of a Movie Review

Movie, novel, essay, poem, and drama are the pillars of literature. Hence, like any other art form, the more you know about the craft of movie making, the better your experience will be watching it. Hence, we write movie reviews. Writing a movie review can be challenging for even established writers because a movie review is not just about writing eloquently or critically about plots and sub-plots of a movie, or its characters. A movie review is much more than that. The purpose of a movie review is to inform readers about what a movie is about, how it is made and who all worked to make it. The goal of a movie reviewer should be to teach the audience as much about the movie, and the different techniques used in the movie as he could without letting out critical details of the movie.

If you are just starting out your journey of writing movie reviews then having an organized list of elements to look for while writing a movie review will be very much helpful. In this post, I am going to provide a list of elements that you should look for while writing review for a movie, but before everything else, watch the movie of which you are planning to write the review. Once, you are though with the movie and the popcorn, it is time to see which all elements you need to analyze the movie against. The elements of the movie review can be classified into three broad categories. One is plain informative like who is the director, when it was made, who are the actors etc., another is qualitative or descriptive, and the third one is technical aspects. Below is a complete list of elements, you need to keep handy while writing a review.

Informative

1.       Name of the movie

2.       Year of release

3.       Actors

4.       Director

5.       Certification

6.       Running time

7.       Genre

8.       Awards

Qualitative or descriptive

1.       Intended Target Audience

2.       Story line

3.       Sub- plots

4.       Treatment of the story

5.       Major characters

6.       Minor characters

7.       Structure of the movie

8.       Narrative technique used

9.       Sue of turns and twists

Technical aspect

1.       Lighting

2.       Music

3.       Cinematography

4.       Camera use

5.       Transitions and editing

6.       Mood

7.       speed

Warning: In essence, the movie review you have written is your opinion of the movie. Keep this in mind, and while writing a review, do not get tempted to reveal the complete story line. Your purpose is to give only the details that can help the readers of your review to form an opinion about the movie, not to retell the story of a movie.

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