How to Write a Movie Review: A Comprehensive Guide

For as long as there have been movies, people have voiced their appreciation and concerns about specific elements of those movies. What started as a simple newspaper column article has become a phenomenon that, today, millions of people partake in.

Whether you're scrolling through social media or reading the weekend edition of your local newspaper, you're bound to encounter someone's opinion about the latest blockbuster or indie favorite.

But a movie review is not just a simple thumbs up or thumbs down.

It's a carefully crafted piece of writing that analyzes, interprets, and evaluates a film while helping readers decide whether to invest their time and money in watching it.

From professional film critics working for major publications to enthusiastic film buffs sharing their thoughts on platforms like Letterboxd, movie reviews have become an integral part of how we experience and discuss cinema.

That is why we have created this in-depth guide on how to write a movie review to guide movie lovers on how to convert their feelings about a movie into detailed, honest, and respectful words.

Let’s get started.

A Brief Look at Film Review History

The tradition of film criticism began almost as soon as cinema itself was born in the early 1900s.

Legendary critics like Pauline Kael brought passionate, conversational writing to The New Yorker, while Roger Ebert became America's most famous movie critic, winning a Pulitzer Prize and reaching millions through his accessible prose and genuine love for cinema.

But the art did not stop with them. As the cinema landscape and technology evolved, the torch was passed on to new voices. Today's landscape includes professional critics like A.O. Scott at The New York Times and voices like Angelica Jade Bastién at Vulture, who brings cultural analysis to her film writing.

The platforms have diversified, too.

Letterboxd has emerged as the premier social network for film enthusiasts, allowing anyone to log films and write reviews. Rotten Tomatoes aggregates professional and audience opinions, while YouTube has given rise to video essayists creating sophisticated visual analyses that would have been impossible in print.

How Movie Reviews Have Evolved

Movie reviews have transformed dramatically over the past century.

In the early days, newspaper reviews were constrained by space. Critics had to be economical, following a standardized film review format:

• a lead paragraph with their overall take,
• a plot synopsis,
• analysis of technical elements
• a recommendation.

This image was taken from Review Party Dot Com.

As the internet removed space constraints, long-form film criticism flourished.

Critics could now write five thousand words or more, incorporating historical context and deep thematic exploration. The internet also democratized the field. Anyone could start a blog or contribute to sites like Medium, breaking traditional gatekeeping.

The most recent shift has been toward video content.

YouTube channels create everything from straightforward reviews to elaborate video essays. People watch a movie and run to YouTube to see what they missed.

For example, I recently watched a movie called “The Banshees of Inisherin.” At first glance, it seemed like a straightforward movie about two best friends having a fallout. But upon watching videos on YouTube, I learned about the deeper references to the Irish Civil War.

Movie reviews hold immense power when it comes to getting people excited about a movie and explaining the true intentions behind them. But it is only possible when a review is written effectively and with heart.

And that is what we are here to learn.

The Essential Steps: How to Write a Film Review

Learning how to write a film review requires a systematic approach that goes far beyond watching a movie and jotting down immediate reactions. The process begins long before you start writing and continues well after the credits roll.

Research the Context Before Viewing

Before you watch the film, spend time understanding its background. You should have a complete history of:

• Director
• Producer
• Screenwriter
• Cast

Research the director's previous work and their distinctive style or thematic preoccupations. This will help you understand if they retain or divert from their usual style, giving you something unique to talk about

Learn about the screenwriter, the source material, if it's an adaptation, and the production circumstances.

• Was this a troubled production?
• Is this a debut film or a late-career statement?

Understanding context enriches your viewing experience and provides material for analysis.
Knowing an actor's range and previous roles helps you assess whether their performance represents a departure or continuation of their established persona. The same applies to the cinematographer.

View the Film Multiple Times

Movies have so much going on, visually and plotwise, that it’s nearly impossible to notice everything in a single viewing. This is why you should at least watch a movie twice.

Your first viewing should be as pure an experience as possible.

• Resist taking extensive notes during the film
• Immerse yourself in the story and emotions of the film to establish your gut reaction
• Immediately after watching, while impressions are fresh, write down your initial reactions.

The initial write-up should ask questions:

• What was your overall emotional response?
• What scenes stood out most vividly?
• What confused or delighted you?

These raw impressions form the foundation of your eventual review and help you maintain a connection to the film as an emotional experience, not just an object of analysis.

But do not stop here.

If you have time, watch again for cinematography, noting camera movement, framing, lighting, and color palette. Another viewing might focus on editing rhythm, sound design, or the score.

Taking detailed notes during these focused viewings gives you specific examples to reference. Instead of vaguely stating that "the cinematography was beautiful," you can point to the specific scenes. Specific observations elevate your movie review from generic praise to substantive movie analysis.

Break Down the Film's Components

A comprehensive film review requires examining the movie's constituent parts individually before discussing how they work together.

Evaluate the Screenplay

• Is the structure conventional or experimental?
• Does the dialogue feel naturalistic or stylized?
• Are the characters well-developed, and does their behavior remain consistent?
• How effectively does the script balance exposition with showing?
• Does it trust the audience to make connections, or does it over-explain?

Assess the Direction

Consider how the filmmaker uses cinematic language to tell the story.

• Does the director favor long takes or rapid cutting?
• Are there recurring visual motifs?
• How is color used symbolically?
• Does the camera remain an invisible observer, or does it call attention to itself?

Analyze the Performances

Evaluate each actor individually and as an ensemble.

• Does each actor understand their character?
• Do they make bold, specific choices, or fall back on clichés?
• Is there chemistry between actors who share scenes?
• Does anyone transcend the material, or does anyone fail to meet the demands of their role?

Consider Technical Elements

• How does the editing establish pace and rhythm?
• Does the sound design create immersion or make symbolic points?
• Does the score enhance emotional moments without manipulating them?
• Are the production design and costumes appropriate to the world and reflective of the characters' inner lives?

Identify Themes and Meaning

Beyond craft analysis, a strong movie review engages with what the film is actually about. Not just its plot, but its themes, ideas, and implications. What questions does the film raise? What does it seem to be saying about human nature, society, relationships, or any other subject it addresses?

Consider how the formal elements you've analyzed serve these thematic interests.

Take a film like "Sinners" as an example of how to excavate deeper thematic layers. On the surface, it might appear to be a straightforward Vampire movie, but a thoughtful analysis reveals how it grapples with colonialism and the violent severing of people from their cultural roots from two angles:

• Foreign belief systems being forced upon Black communities, with Christianity imposed as a tool of control that attempted to erase indigenous spiritual practices and cultural memory.
• The antagonist, Remmick, provides a parallel exploration with his backstory being rooted in England's brutal colonization of Ireland, revealing a man whose family and community were destroyed by imperial conquest.

Be careful not to reduce films to simple messages or morals. Good films usually explore questions rather than provide answers, presenting complexity rather than simplistic conclusions.

Place the Film in Context

Your review gains depth when you situate the film within relevant contexts. The best way to go about this is by asking questions like:

• How does it compare to the director's previous work?
• Does it represent growth, decline, or continuation?
• Where does it fit within its genre?
• Does it honor conventions or subvert them?
• How does it relate to current social, political, or cultural conversations?

Consider the film's relationship to other movies as well. Every film exists in dialogue with cinema history, whether consciously or not. Noting influences, references, or similarities to other works helps readers understand the film's aesthetic and thematic lineage.

Develop Your Central Argument

A movie review is not a list of observations; it's an argument. Your thesis statement might be that the film succeeds brilliantly at what it attempts, that it fails despite promising elements, or that it's deeply flawed yet fascinating.

Everything in your review should support and develop this central argument.

Choose your examples strategically, selecting moments that best illustrate your points. Your film review format should guide readers through your thinking logically. After an opening that establishes your thesis, develop your argument point by point. Each paragraph should advance your analysis, providing evidence from the film to support your claims.

Anticipate and address potential counterarguments. If you're arguing that a film fails despite good performances, acknowledge the performances while explaining why they can't overcome the script's problems.

Write with Precision and Style

Remember one thing: you are not the only person writing a review for that movie.

There are thousands of other people with thousands of unique, and sometimes similar, ideas. You do not want your work to be just another idea that gets lost in the sea of reviews. You want it to stick with people, and that is only possible when you give it some personality and make it interesting.

Film criticism is a literary form, and the best critics are stylists who make reading about films almost as pleasurable as watching them.

• Choose specific, evocative words rather than generic terms.
• Instead of saying a scene was "scary," describe how it generates dread and how it makes your stomach tighten through a horror narrative.
• Show readers what the film does rather than just labeling it.
• Avoid plot summary beyond what's necessary to establish context for your analysis. Readers can find plot descriptions anywhere.

People come to reviews for insight and evaluation. So give them what they want.

Handle Spoilers Thoughtfully

Decide early whether your review will contain spoilers and signal this to readers clearly. Many critics write spoiler-free reviews for new releases, saving deeper analysis that requires discussing endings for later essays.

However, truly comprehensive film criticism often requires discussing the entire film, including its conclusion. There's no universal rule here, but whatever you choose, be consistent and clear with readers about what they can expect.

Revise and Refine Your Work

After completing your first draft, step away from it if possible before revising. Fresh eyes help you identify unclear passages, weak arguments, or redundant sections.

Read your review aloud to catch awkward phrasing and ensure your writing has rhythm and flow. Check that you've supported every claim with specific evidence. Eliminate unnecessary words and tighten loose prose.

Make sure your personality comes through in the writing.

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

As you learn how to write a film review, being aware of common mistakes helps you avoid them.

Too Much Plot Summary

One of the most frequent errors is excessive plot summary. Readers need only enough plot information to understand your analysis. When you make the plot summary too long, you risk revealing crucial plot points, making your review a spoiler hazard.

And believe me, you do not want to spoil the movie for your readers.

Lacking Specific Support

Avoid reviews that amount to "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" without explanation. Your personal reaction is a starting point, not a destination. Readers want to understand why you felt as you did, supported by specific observations about the film.

Confusing Taste with Quality

Resist mistaking your subjective preferences for objective truths.

What I mean by this is that you may dislike horror films, but that doesn't make a well-crafted horror movie bad. It just isn't to your taste.

Be wary of letting a single element, whether a great performance or a problematic scene, dominate your entire assessment. Films are complex works with many components, and your review should reflect this complexity.

Writing in a Vacuum

Don't write disconnected from how actual audiences might experience and understand the film. While you don't need to pander to popular opinion, consider whether your highly theoretical or jargon-heavy analysis communicates effectively with your intended readers. The best film criticism is both intelligent and accessible, never dumbing down ideas but always expressing them clearly.

Being Contrarian for Its Own Sake

Avoid the trap of being a contrarian just to stand out. Disagreeing with critical consensus can be valuable when you have genuine reasons, but cultivating a pose of going against the grain makes your criticism predictable and undermines your credibility.

Comparing Apples to Oranges

Don't hold films to irrelevant standards. A low-budget indie drama shouldn't be criticized for lacking the polish of a major studio production, just as a crowd-pleasing blockbuster shouldn't be dismissed for not being an art film.

Letting Personal Biases Cloud Judgment

Never let personal feelings about people involved in the film's production cloud your judgment of the work itself. You might dislike an actor's public persona or disagree with a director's politics, but your movie review should focus on what's actually on screen.

How Chatly Enhances the Review Writing Process

The emergence of sophisticated AI tools has begun transforming how both aspiring and established critics approach writing movie reviews. Tools like Chatly offer valuable assistance at multiple stages, serving as powerful aids that enhance and streamline your work.

Streamlining Research and Background Information

One of the most valuable applications comes in the research phase.

Before writing your review, you can use Chatly’s AI Search to quickly gather information about a director's:

• filmography
• identifying recurring themes
• stylistic patterns
• evolution across their career

Background knowledge that might take hours to compile through traditional research becomes readily available, allowing you to spend more time on actual analysis rather than information gathering.

You can efficiently fact-check production details through citation-backed results. You can explore connections between the film and others that might inform your analysis.

Understanding Nuances and Symbolism

Chatly’s AI Chat excels at helping you understand nuances that might not be immediately obvious upon viewing.

After watching a film, you can discuss it with Chatly to explore possible interpretations of ambiguous scenes, unpack complex symbolism, or identify cultural references you might have missed. This is particularly valuable when reviewing films from unfamiliar cultural contexts or dealing with dense, layered narratives.

The AI can help you recognize how a particular gesture might carry specific cultural meaning, or how a seemingly random image connects to a broader symbolic pattern in the film.

Exploring Theoretical Frameworks

Chatly proves particularly useful when you need to explore theoretical frameworks or critical approaches that might illuminate the film.

If you sense a movie engaging with feminist themes but want to articulate this more precisely, Chatly can explain relevant concepts from feminist film theory and help you apply them to specific scenes or patterns in the movie.

This theoretical grounding can elevate your movie analysis from an impressionistic response to rigorous criticism.

Assistance with Writing and Organization

If you're struggling to articulate a particular point or find the right words to describe a visual technique, Chatly can suggest vocabulary and phrasing options. This is especially helpful for writers whose first language isn't English or those expanding their critical vocabulary.

Specifically, Chatly can help with:

• Organizing your thoughts by suggesting structural approaches based on your main arguments and the points you want to emphasize
• Meeting academic requirements, including formatting, citation styles, and ensuring your movie review essay follows proper conventions
• Adapting to different formats by explaining film review format conventions from journalistic reviews to academic papers, helping you match your target publication's requirements
• Finding precise language for describing complex visual techniques, emotional tones, or abstract thematic concepts that might be difficult to put into words

You can even go beyond simple reviews and use Chatly to dive into movie novelization where you incorporate your ideas in a story.

Refining Through Editing and Feedback

Editing and revision benefit significantly from AI assistance. You can use Chatly AI Chat to identify passages that need clarification, sentences that could be more concise, or arguments that need better support.

AI can spot when you've used vague language instead of a specific description, or when you've made claims without providing evidence. This kind of granular feedback helps you refine your writing and develop better habits over time.

Serving as an Intellectual Sparring Partner

Perhaps most intriguingly, Chatly can serve as an intellectual sparring partner during the critical thinking process. You can debate interpretations, testing whether your reading of a film holds up against alternative perspectives.

This dialectical process of proposing an interpretation, considering objections, and refining your position mirrors the kind of critical thinking that produces the strongest film criticism.

Support for Video Content Creation

For video content creators who produce reviews for YouTube or other platforms, AI Chat can assist with scripting, helping you structure your thoughts for oral delivery rather than written reading. Chatly can suggest how to make your script more conversational, where to incorporate clips, and how to build compelling arguments that work in video format.

If you are looking to create artistic thumbnails and images to use in your video, you can use AI image generation in Chatly to create new images or edit previous ones.

Disclaimer

It's important to emphasize that AI tools work best as collaborators rather than replacements. The critical insights, the distinctive voice, the ability to connect emotionally with a film, these remain fundamentally human contributions.

Creating Your Movie Review Template

As you develop your practice, creating a personal movie review template can help ensure consistency and completeness in your work.

Your template might include sections for:

• Opening hook and thesis that captures your overall assessment and draws readers in
• Brief context about the director, genre, or relevant background information
• Technical analysis covering cinematography, editing, sound design, and production elements
• Performance evaluation examining how actors embody their characters
• Thematic exploration, digging into what the film is really about beyond its plot
• Contextual placement showing how the film relates to the director's other work, its genre, or broader cultural conversations
• Final evaluation that reinforces your thesis and provides a clear recommendation

Some critics like to structure their reviews chronologically through the filmmaking process. Others prefer a thematic organization, grouping observations by the ideas the film explores. Experiment with different approaches until you find what works for your voice and the types of films you most often review.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to write a film review is ultimately about developing your ability to watch films attentively, think about them rigorously, and communicate your insights effectively. The process combines careful observation, broad knowledge of cinema, understanding of film techniques, awareness of cultural and historical context, and clear, engaging writing.

As you write more reviews, you'll develop a distinctive critical voice, a particular set of interests, values, and stylistic choices that make your writing recognizable. Some critics emphasize technical craft, others focus on thematic content, and still others privilege emotional impact or political implications. There's no single correct approach to film criticism, which is why the field remains vital and endlessly fascinating.

But the good thing is that you do not have to do this alone. Chatly and other tools are there to help you every step of the way. Just do not make them a replacement for your critical thinking and analysis.