The review is a journalistic genre in which the main ideas of an original work are summarized and criticized. In general, it is written by knowledgeable people in the area, be it cinema, literature, television, among others. The critical review is an opinion text, but not without arguments. Therefore, it is important that the author investigates and has knowledge on the subject.
Would you like to be able to express what you feel or think about a literary or artistic work using the appropriate methodology and technique? In oneHOWTO we teach you how to make a critical review so that nothing you want to express about what you have read or witnessed escapes you. Write!
The critical review is an argumentative and expository text that arises from the analysis of the ideas contained in the work to be reviewed. Use information of interest about the work and its author so that the reader knows everything they should know about it without seeing it.
The text of the review It should be clear and concise. It should limit itself to talking about the work and the cultural context in which it is found, without digressing or dwelling on issues that are not relevant. The review is not a literary essayTherefore, it is much shorter and focuses on explaining the key points of the topic to the reader.
With this in mind, main characteristics of a critical review are:
- You must use formal language.
- Your analysis should be written in a structured way.
- It should be based on what is in the original work and interesting data about its creation.
- All subjective arguments must be argued and supported by what can be appreciated within the work.
- Use the paraphrase as a speech to express and explain the ideas contained in the work.
- It should be written in such a way that the reader understands the degree of importance of the original source.
- The review should expand the knowledge about the content analyzed.
- The critical review should highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the original source.
- It can be made from any work regardless of its release date.
Structure of the critical review
If this is your first time writing a review, it is important that you know the traditional structure of the critical review so that you do not have excess or lack of content of importance to the reader. This structure is not strict, but it will be a useful guide if you are a beginner.
- Qualification: it should be short, shocking and interesting.
- Technical data sheet (optional): It is used, above all, in movie reviews. Here the most important data of the work are written, such as the title, the author, the year of creation, the genre and the country.
- Introduction to the work: enter the work to be discussed with data of interest that help to contextualize the work.
- Summary of the work: exposes the main aspects of the work, based on the content of the original source. This should summarize the most important of the content, the key scenes or chapters and the techniques used. Here you can also mention data of interest about the work, such as the historical context in which it was created.
- Critical comments: critical comments are, on many occasions, intertwined with the summary of the work. Here the ideas and opinions of the author of the review are presented in an argued way, whether positive or negative.
- Conclusions: the most outstanding thing about the analysis is exposed in a summarized way, as well as the position and final assessment of the author.
All analysis text must be structured and well thought out. The critical review must follow a logical order and the paragraphs that compose it must be interconnected. We explain below how to write a critical review argued and expository step by step:
- Select the original content you want to critically review, be it a book, an article, an investigation, a movie, among others. We suggest you choose a topic that you are proficient and of which you already have cultural references.
- Write down the key data of the work, such as: title, author, year of publication or presentation, literary or musical genre, artistic current, that is, everything that helps to identify the original source.
- Investigate the author to learn about his life, his previous works, the main themes of his works, his style and his influences.
- Read previously written reviews of the work. This will help you to know the general opinion about the work and its importance, as well as to detect aspects of the work that you have not noticed for yourself.
- Make a draft explaining in your words what the analyzed work is about.
- Identify the main ideas of the author and relate them to aspects that help you explain their relevance more clearly, such as the historical context, the life of the author or his influences.
- Select the most significant of all your notes.
- Present your ideas and opinions and support them with everything you have investigated.
- Write a brief conclusion to the topic and your position on it.
As with all discussion texts, you may find it difficult to know where to start or how to connect the paragraphs once you start. What is important and what is not? What is worth mentioning and what is best left out? How do you relate the ideas you have? Therefore, we suggest that you keep these questions in mind when making a critical review:
- What is the purpose or message of the original content? Once you know it, ask yourself: how is this purpose reflected within the work? In what chapters? In what scenes? In what dialogues? Through what artistic, cinematographic or literary techniques? By analyzing these aspects, you will be able to argue your opinions about the work and its quality.
- To know if the message of the work is effective, you can ask yourself: How is the content developed?Is it easy to understand? Is it well presented? Does it make effective use of the techniques of its kind?
- What is the historical and cultural context of the work? This will help you define the author’s influences, frame him within an artistic or thought stream, and identify works similar to his that can be mentioned within the review.
If you want to start writing reviews for a blog or a website, we invite you to visit our article How to write for a blog and discover more tips.
Here is a example of a critical review from a movie. In this case, the movie Jojo Rabbit (2019) is reviewed, this review was published in the newspaper El País in January 2020.
My friend Adolf Hitler
Author: Javier Ocaña.
The punctual and very healthy tradition of laughter around Nazism, its powerful and ridiculous paraphernalia, born even with Adolf Hitler in life, with Being or not being, by Ernst Lubitsch (“Heil, myself!”), With The great Dictador, by Charles Chaplin (“Demokratia schtunk!”), has a new chapter with Jojo Rabbit, a film by talented New Zealander Taika Waititi, based on Christine Leunens’ novel The Caged Sky.
Apparent black comedy, due to its theme, actually in a white tone because the cruel laugh appears to a lesser extent than the pantomime and even the melodrama, Jojo Rabbit ends up being a great movie for the whole family, with all that this entails : its popular virtues and its inevitable honeyed and inconsequential defects. Waititi, demystifier of the vampiric universe in the hideous What We Do in the Shadows (2014), apologist for playful strength and superheroic freshness in Thor: Ragnarok (2017), has composed a satire on the need for affections in age A child from a fabulous and risky situation: a Nazi German kid who has his imaginary friend in Hitler, which gives rise to the best moments of the film, along with the brilliant opening sequences in the youth camp Hitler and the precious friendship with the fat boy.
Waititi, also interpreter of the dictator, brings together in his brilliant physical gestures and in his tonality of voice the dangerous absurdity, the pathos and the inevitable comedy of a tragic character in history. And, as a director, he seems to have been inspired by Wes Anderson’s cinema, both in the use of color and in the frontality of the shots, thus forming a lewd tale about the ease of killing and, alas, the most discreet of the film, a moral fable about the friendship between different people, the Nazi child and the Jewish archetype of Anne Frank, which at some point is too reminiscent of The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
The better the more ruthless and shameless, Jojo Rabbit, a candidate for six Oscars, will be remembered more for her insolent jokes and dazzling musical montages than for her humanistic encouragement, more sad than emotional. But that, in a work on such a committed subject, is a double merit.
If, on the other hand, you want to know specific advice to make a review of a book, we invite you to visit our article How to Review a Book.