Magazine Film Review - Codes & Conventions

As well as researching into the codes and conventions of the film poster, another ancillary task, that needs to be completed is a film review for a magazine. This again meant that I needed to research and investigate into current magazines to understand how they were composited together and what features were unique to the review. I bought and investigated into the film reviews from "Total Film" and "Empire Magazine". I have analysed four reviews from both magazines these being the double page, single page, half page, and column size review. This will give me a foundation understanding for the key and necessary elements for a review, as the column size is smaller and therefore the key elements are necessary, where as the double spreads, being larger will use more sophisticated, second or tertiary elements will be used.

Images: From analysing all eight reviews one of the key elements to engage the audience is to include a image of the film. This image should be taken from the film and reflect and connote the films genre and cinematic style. The image is usually positioned at the top left hand corner of the review as it is usually the first place the audiences eye is attracted to and therefore should suggest and reveal to the audience the type of film, and should also engage them. The image size is relational to the amount of content that is in text body and should feel all the free and available space on the page.

Title: The title should be positioned below the image and is usually the largest font on the page, and therefore is the most significant and also the next element the audience looks at after the image. However the style of fonts and sizes is all relational to the house style of the page with some magazines using the san serif and other using serif font.


Text Body: Text body takes up the largest amount of relatives space on the page, however is usually in the smallest font. In all the reviews that I have looked at the text body has been designed and laid out in columns to feel the available space. The style matches the house style of the page and usually reflects the same style as the title however being in a smaller font.


Rating: On every review I looked at there was a rating to indicate how good or bad the film was. In all of the reviews there was a star rating (1 to 5) indicating how goods or bad the film is. Depending on the magazine this was either positioned at the beginning of the review below the title or at the end of the review, after the text body.


Other (background) information: On all of the reviews they had to some extent some background information about the film, such as the director's name, the release date, the cast, and the certificates (etc). This was usually in the same style as the text body but positions in different places according to what magazine reports. For example "Total Film" positioned the further information at the end of their review whereas "Empire" positioned it at the beginning of the review.


Author's name: Of all 8 reviews there was the authors name of the article at the bottom of the page positioned within the text body at the end of the last sentence. Though it was positioned in the text body this style of font was similar with the major difference being that it was a bold font separated from the main content.


Verdict: On every review there was a verdict or conclusion summarising what they commented on within the text body giving the audience and overview and final summery to take away from the article. This was positioned in all the reviews at the end, after the text body.

After investigating into the current code and conventions of a film review I have a much better understanding of the needed and necessary elements that are usually used in a traditional review. Now I can go away and start to consider how I would like my review to be designed and composed, however I still feel that I need to investigate into the style of writing a review with researching into the actual written content of the text body. This will help me and support me in my writing as I will begin to understand the structure and necessary language that is used in writing a review, opposed to a commentary or essay style of writing.