Post 20: Ancillary Task 2 - Film Reviews

After films have been released they tend to be reviewed by a number of different people, including critics from a range of different newspapers and magazines. We looked at many different film reviews of films in order to distinguish typical conventions and how they may vary in different magazines. 
Below are all the different articles I looked at from different magazines and newspapers, highlighting different conventions.

The first is a film review from Empire magazine of the film New Moon:

Some typical conventions of the film reviews in this magazine are that firstly it always shows some of the film information, such as the release date, director, cast and plot. It has a distinct layout that is noticeably from Empire magazine and because this is consistent throughout all of their magazines when a reader is reading through they automatically know the review is from Empire magazine. This particular film review uses a dominating picture in order to grab the attention of the audience and hopefully entice them to read it. Finally at the end of the review there is a small section that gives a verdict and rating of the film, this is good as the reader may want to see this to decide to go see it or not.

As well as looking at a magazine, I also decided to look at a newspaper review in order to be able to compare and notice any differences. The newspaper I looked at was The Guardian and below is the review of the film Oz The Great and Powerful. I have annotated the review in order to highlight certain techniques and conventions:



Oz The Great and Powerful - Review
As some of my annotations show, a clear typical convention used with any review is a bold title, as this was also used in the Empire magazine review. The reason for this being when readers are reading the paper they will be able to identify what film is being reviewed straight away. Another convention for some film reviews is a dominating photo, this grabs the audiences' attention, again seen in the review about the film New Moon above. As seen in my annotations another part of the review is the use of actors' names. This allows the audience to find out just who is in the film and hopefully entice them to go see it.

The layout I decided to mimic was the layout that is commonly used throughout the magazine Empire. The reason for this being that I simply like the way it lays out the review and the use of a dominating picture. Below is a draft of how I will lay out my film review:

I plan to have a dominating picture of Sophie and Alan so that it's clear to the audience who the main characters are. Along with this in the section that says "info about film" I plan to follow Empire and put the release date, certificate, director, cast, running time and plot.