The Importance of Honesty in a Movie Review

Video Transcript

"Hi there! I'm Amy Wallace on behalf of Expert Village and today we are going to be discussing how to be a good movie critic or more importantly, how to start out as a movie critic with a budget. When you are writing your review, it is very important to be sure to keep in mind your audience. If you are going to be writing specifically say for a website that is catering towards horror fans, don't forget who you are writing toward and they like a little bit of fun as well. If you are writing towards a much broader audience, you are going to want to avoid things such as technical jargon. In short, nobody really cares that you know what a lap dissolve is. The main thing that the average person you are trying to reach through a critique is they just want to know if they are going to have a good time when they go and see a movie. If they are going to be touched or scared, if they are thought provoking. Basically the other main point is they want to be discussing just this film ini general. Be sure not to get too excited or wound up in filmmakers themselves. You are judging this film, you are not judging their entire cataloge. It is always important that you keep that in mind although you can elude to past work a little bit. Try not to get carried away. Some things that you may want to consider is a lot of critics like to use some sort of sliding scale on how to grade a film they have just seen. A 4 or 5 start kind of rating system is very popular so is the thumbs up, thumbs down made famous by John Cisco and Roger Everett. It is actually probably not the best way to go because you are pretty much just saying yes or no and as we all know, films they change and things aren't black or white basically. Anther possibility is to do so many of whatever out of 10. This is probably the best way to do it because that way you are giving yourself a whole lot of room for movement. Be sure to have your idea of what makes a perfect film and what makes a horrible film before you start rating things though. That way you will have a perspective of where things fit. "