Your review should: 1) situate the film within a genre or context for your readers; 2) assess the film’s positive and negative qualities; and 3) explain the criteria for your assessment.
One the most common ways of writing about films is to recommend (or not recommend) them. You’ve almost certainly done this in a more informal way – you’ve mentioned enjoying a movie to your friends or family, and explained what you liked and/or disliked about it. This project asks you to construct a slightly more elaborated evaluation, using a clear set of criteria and a filmic vocabulary appropriate to the review format.
There are four key elements you should address for a successful project:
Who is your audience? What do you know about them and their interests? How does that affect your review?
What do you know about the film? Its target audience, the techniques it uses, the characters, plot, tone, theme, pacing, etc. What connections do you need to make between the content and your audience?
What information and perspective can you provide that will help your audience decide to see or not see the film? In other words, what kinds of evidence, reasoning, and background knowledge can you bring to your audience to help them make a choice?
Ultimately, do you recommend this audience see the film? Does that recommendation clearly follow from the information about the audience, the information you’ve emphasized about the film, and your reasoning?
Note that your review might not answer these questions in order, or even separately from one another. Film reviews are a flexible genre that allows for some creative approaches. The best way to learn about how reviews are structured (and to see how individual reviewers approach the questions above) is to read film reviews. I suggest starting with review aggregator sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes, and perhaps also looking at sites that have dedicated reviewers on staff (like the AV Club, The Film Junkies, the Guardian, the Atlantic, Roger Ebert, Screen Rant, various other journalistic publications, etc.) to compare how reviewers’ approaches differ even on the same site (and how the same reviewers’ approaches differ across reviews).
