Roger Ebert kept quoting the critic Robert Warshow's line that a man goes to the movies, and the critic must be honest enough to admit he is that man. It is a good starting point for anyone writing a review, because it admits the thing most reviews try to hide: your reaction is personal, and pretending otherwise does not make the review more objective, it just makes it less honest.
Lead with what the film is, not with your verdict
Open by placing the film: its genre, its ambition, the experience it is reaching for. Ebert used what he called a generic theory of criticism, judging a movie partly against the expectations set by its own kind rather than against every film ever made. Slam a quiet character drama for lacking action and you have reviewed the film you wanted instead of the one that exists. Parasite, which won the Palme d'Or before it won Best Picture, got misread by some early audiences expecting a straightforward thriller when Bong Joon-ho was building something that shifts genre twice in its 132 minutes.
Pauline Kael took the opposite approach, on purpose
Pauline Kael wrote from the belief that her own reaction was the instrument worth trusting, and that other critics hiding behind claims of objectivity were being less honest than she was, not more. She was not always right, and she was often deliberately contrarian. But she made a real case that a review pretending to have no point of view is usually just a review hiding one badly.
Kael's method and Ebert's generic theory disagree on plenty, but they agree on the same underlying point: a review with no visible person behind it is not more trustworthy for the omission. It is just less useful, because the reader has no way to calibrate against a reaction they cannot see.
Separate craft from taste
A film can be well made and not for you, or clumsy and beloved anyway. Ebert's star system was explicit about this: four stars meant great, one meant bad, and zero meant a film with no value at all, not merely poor craft but something morally or artistically empty. Trustworthy critics keep the lanes separate. Here is what the film does skillfully, and separately, here is what I personally responded to. A reader can borrow your craft judgment even when their taste runs nothing like yours.
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Show one scene, do not summarize the plot
The weakest reviews recap the story beat by beat. The strongest pick one small, spoiler-safe moment and use it to illustrate something larger. If you want to know how much detail is too much detail for a given film, the piece on spoilers walks through that split in more depth than fits here. One well-chosen scene, described precisely, tells a reader more about tone and quality than a paragraph of plot summary ever will.
- A scene, described precisely, over a plot summary
- A specific verified fact over a vague superlative
- An honest limit over a confident guess
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Numbers help, but only in service of a claim
A review can use verified facts, a $4.5 million budget returning nearly $260 million for Get Out, a 98 percent critics score, without turning into a spreadsheet. The number should back up a point you are already making, not stand in for one. Saying a film made money tells a reader nothing about whether they will enjoy it. Saying a $4.5 million horror movie won an Original Screenplay Oscar tells them something specific about how unusual its script was.
Aggregate scores are a starting point, not a verdict
A 99 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, which Parasite holds, tells you that critics broadly agreed the film was well made. It does not tell you whether the specific reader in front of you will connect with it. Treating an aggregate score as the review itself is a shortcut that skips the actual work criticism is supposed to do, which is explain the reasoning behind the number, not just report it.
A review is also a small piece of film history
Parasite's Best Picture win in 2020 marked the first time a non-English-language film had taken the award, and any review written that year that failed to note the significance of the ceremony was leaving out context a reader deserved. A review does not exist purely in the moment of release. It sits inside a history of what critics and audiences have rewarded before, and pretending a film arrived in a vacuum flattens part of what makes it worth writing about.
That context does not have to dominate a review. A single accurate sentence placing the film in its moment is usually enough. The rest of the review still has to be about the film itself, not about the award season surrounding it, in the same way a good watchlist recommendation names the film before it names the occasion.
Admit what you have not seen
A trustworthy critic says plainly when they have not watched a director's cut, have not seen a film in its original language, or missed a franchise entry that context depends on. I have not seen the extended cut of a number of films I have reviewed on their theatrical release, and saying so up front is more useful to a reader than pretending the gap does not exist. Readers forgive an honest limit far more easily than they forgive a review that quietly overreaches.
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Be honest about who a film is for
End by naming the audience. Who will love this, who should skip it, what mood it suits. A review that helps a reader make a good decision, even a decision to skip a film entirely, has done more useful work than one that simply announces whether the writer approved. Ebert's relative rating system existed for exactly this reason: a five-star review of a broad comedy and a five-star review of a festival drama are not making the same claim, and readers deserve to know which one they are getting.
None of this requires being right every time, and Ebert himself revised opinions publicly more than once over a long career. It requires being useful and being honest about where the review is opinion and where it is observation. Do that consistently and readers keep coming back, which is the only rating that has ever actually mattered for a critic.
The best compliment a review can get is not agreement. It is a reader who disagreed with your verdict and still felt like the review told them exactly what they were going to disagree with before they pressed play.
That kind of trust takes longer to build than a single well-written review, and it can be spent quickly by one dishonest paragraph. Worth remembering the next time a review tempts you to round a score up because a friend worked on the film, or round one down because a genre is easy to sneer at from a distance.
