The Art of Reviewing Movies

November 7th, 2007 | My Movie recommendations and reviews

Reviewing movies is an Art.

Like any other Art, it’s unique.

No two person review movies in the same way. That brings us to focus the different ways to review movies.

We’ll go ahead and see the ways we can reviews movies. Since rating a movie is a way of review, I’m presenting both review and ratings now.

An Unique Rating

Meetu who blogs without giving the movie away (found via Desicritics) reviews movies and sums up in an interesting way.

See her Jab We Met review:

Rating: Wait for video release

Rating Scale (best to worst):
• Must see - on the big screen
• Watch for sure, preferably in theatre
• Wait for video release
• Watch if you have nothing better to do
• Switch channels if it’s on cable!

Isn’t that interesting?

without giving the movie away is nominated in Best Asian Blog in the 2007 Weblogs Awards. Good Luck, Meetu.

The Final Word & ‘read-what-I-write’ Review

If you’re a expert or authoritative as Baradwaj Rangan who blogs at Blogical Conclusion, then you indulge in these type. Your trademark is a headline which sums up the movie, you don’t rate the movie and have a image.

Take Review: The Good German:

Headline: SLAY IT AGAIN, SAM
“Short Review”: The spirit of ‘Casablanca’ is snuffed out in a modernist makeover that’s nonetheless hard to entirely dismiss.
Experts: IF YOU’VE EVER WONDERED how Casablanca would have turned out had Ingrid Bergman been violated doggy-style and if Humphrey Bogart had said “fuck” a lot, you owe it to yourself to experience Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German – except that it’s not just Casablanca that’s being channelled here.

The Bottomline Review

No ratings here as well. Before the actual review, we have the Genre, Director, and the Bottomline. Sudhish Kamath who writes for The Hindu and blogs at Footnotes from the dark do the same. Being a journo, his reviews are well written.

From Johnny Gaddaar: Are you game?

Storyline: A con betrays his gang during a two-and-a-half crore deal.
Bottomline: A slick, riveting, intelligent game of cards.
Excerpts: Take a bow, Raghavan. Double Thumbs Up. Five on five stars.

A must-watch for the likes of Sanjay Gupta and Priyadarshan. A crash course on the huge difference between tribute and plagiarism.

Star Rating

This way is classic, ain’t it? Deep who blogs at Deep’s home reviews Bollywood movies and rates the movies out of 5 stars in image.

Mini Reviews with Star Ratings

Perfect for those who watch a lot of movies. I do this in the Movie Reviews page. A short review and ‘10 star’ rating of every movie I watch is featured.

Passion for Cinema blog being a group blog, features mini reviews of the editors with ‘5 Star’ rating, in their sidebar.

The Reel Rating

Because plain Stars (*** or ) ratings are boring. Guys at IndiaFM rate movies out of 5 reels.

‘Pictures-tell-thousand-words’ Review

It’s a lot of work and requires creativity to come up like this regularly, so not sure if anyone does these regularly. When they do (and done well), we’ll enjoy them. Two of such movie review:

The last 10 films!
10 movie reviewed in a comic strip! And a short review comes up after that.

[Click on the image to see the larger image & click on the title to read the original review]