Definition: 

"a review of a book, film, television or radio programme that is suitable for inclusion in a newspaper or magazine.  It is based on the author's experience and is subjective."  (IB Diploma Programme Guide, 2002)

Purpose

• give an account of the subject in question (the book, film, play, or event) and offer a reasoned opinion about its qualities
• more than informative; it should also be entertaining

Steps

(adapted from How to Write a Book Review and How to Write a Movie Review)

1. get familiar with the context of the book/tv etc.
2. write a statement with essential details of the book / film / TV / radio, such as name, author, director, other publication details.
3. formulate a specific opinion (thesis) in one sentence
4. create a good lead, e.g.
   • start with a quote
   • refer to the reputation of the author/director/actor
   • compare it with another similar movie/book/program/tv
   • explain your expectation and whether it is fulfilled or not
5. recap briefly about the story/plot/programme
6. back up your main opinion with specific examples
7. assessment of value and comparison with others
8. include a picture

Body of the Critique

(adapted from How to write reviews and How to Write a Book Review)

Things to consider in a film/book etc when you are reviewing:

• theme - any large contemporary issues?
• genre or context
• style and quality of writing/filming/production
• are the characters vividly portrayed and memorable?
• structure
• how did it affect you? how is it related to your own course or personal agenda? What personal experiences you've had relate to the subject?
• how well has it achieved its goal?

Language

(adapted from How to Write a Movie Review)

• be interesting and engage the readers
• you can use metaphors, analogy, specific adjectives and adverbs to create the images you're looking for
• be concise
• be honest in your opinions, and judge against standards of the particular type of work
• don't be over-negative

Reminders:

(adapted from How to Write a Movie Review)

• DON'T simply summarize the plot
• DON'T give away key moments!
• keep in mind: your readers, the type of review, and the purpose of the review

Model - Book review in NY Times:

(http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/books/review/Toibin-t.html?ref=review)

The Story Artist     By COLM TOIBIN

The best of Donald Barthelme’s stories have an exquisite, shimmering beauty. They take immense risks with tone and content; they bathe the known world in the waters of irony, rhythmic energy and exuberant formal trickiness. The systems used in his style are close to the thrilling moments of obscure mystery in John Ashbery’s poetry, or to the non sequitur followed by pure sequitur in the plays of Beckett, or to the deadpan radiant perfection in the sentences of Don DeLillo. It is easy for work like Barthelme’s, so exciting when it first appears, to date and seem stale, and eventually, on subsequent readings, to become too smart for its own good — but this has not happened with many of the stories. For making it new and strange, he is a heroic figure in modern literature. And, even though fashions have changed and he no longer sits center stage, he remains an important influence, especially in the United States.

It is maybe right and fitting that Donald Barthelme the writer arose in response to another exacting presence who also bore his name — his father, Donald Barthelme the architect. The senior Barthelme created important modern buildings in Texas, including the family home on the outskirts of Houston, and spent his life preaching and teaching about the need for a new and uncompromising modern style. (“Be prepared for failure,” he told his son once he had seriously embarked on his career as a writer.) Donald Jr., born in 1931, remembered moving when he was 8 to the house his father had built: it was, he said, “wonderful to live in but strange to see on the Texas prairie. On Sundays people used to park their cars out on the street and stare. . . . We used to get up from Sunday dinner, if enough cars had parked, and run out in front of the house in a sort of chorus line, doing high kicks.”

The early chapters of Tracy Daugherty’s admiring, comprehensive and painstaking biography of Donald Barthelme, “Hiding Man,” emphasize the challenging education he received in taste and theory from his father and then the brilliant education he gave himself in Houston when he was in his 20s. Barthelme was a journalist, a jazz lover, an art lover, a moviegoer, an avid reader, a curator and, with his second wife, a writer and designer of advertisements. He was also the brilliant young editor of the magazine Forum, which he oversaw from 1956 (after he returned from the Korean War) to 1960, publishing original work by figures like Leslie Fiedler, Hugh Kenner, William Carlos Williams, Norman Mailer, Walker Percy and Alain Robbe-Grillet. In 1960 he published Marshall McLuhan’s speech “The Medium Is the Message.”

[...]

And he has been lucky, finally, in having a biographer who has not dwelt too much on the darkness in Barthelme’s soul, the unevenness of the work or the sadness and messiness of his life. Daugherty, instead, has managed to make a case for a body of work in which the best stories have the aura of a second act, and to create a convincing narrative out of a life that was deeply engaged, passionate and maybe even fulfilled, despite the demons, and out of a life of the mind that was rigorous, exacting and, despite Barthelme’s early death, deeply productive.

Why is this a good model?

• first sentence sets the tone of the review, reveals the writer's attitude towards the book
• descriptive language to create images in readers' minds
• comparison of the author's style with other writers
• provides the story and plot of the book
• appropriate language for the NY Times audience -- well educated, hence sophisticated language used
• talks about the book's theme
• contains comments about the book -- uses a less personal voice to sound more authoritative due to the nature of the newspaper
• provides textual detail of the book