Film Reviews Custom Essay

ASSIGNMENT 1: Film Reviews

TASK: Write two Film reviews

Review 1 (500 words)
Film Title – To be confirmed (cinema trip screening)
The film is Robocop(2014)
Review 2 (500 words)
Review a film (of your choice). It should be either one made before 1960 or a foreign-language film (any period): film title to be agreed by the tutor

Review Guidelines:

1. You need to decide which publication you are writing for and CLEARLY STATE THIS in your assignment title. You are writing for a broadsheet newspaper. Make a

study of reviews in a newspaper and model your review on this. Identify the newspaper at the top of your review. Once you have chosen your publication you will need

to consider the intended readership and to think about how it should be addressed by the review. You will need to read a range of reviews to get a feel for the level

and style of this mode of address.

2. Decide which film you will review and consider some of the following questions:
How does the film relate to genre theory?
How does the film relate to the historical context in which it is made
Does the film embrace Hollywood conventions?
Is the review informed by seminar discussion?

1 Your reviews should not be about appreciation as such. It is intended to be analytical as well as descriptive. The extent to which you achieve this will

demonstrate your understanding of the issues raised in the module.

2 These are hypothetical reviews – which may have been commissioned by the arts editor of the magazine of newspaper. Remember to treat it as if it were for

publication. Observe the word-length and only deviate from this 10% either way.

3 Unusually for a review you must include a bibliography (which is in addition to the word count), in which you acknowledge the source of your ideas. You should

include everything that you have consulted in writing your reviews: articles, books, reviews, etc. Your bibliography should be presented according to academic

conventions. This will be discussed in the seminar.

4 The best way to prepare for this assessment is to read the press and listen to radio and TV. You should try to observe the conventions used in writing

professional reviews.

Please ensure your reviews include the following:
• The title of the publication in which the review is to be printed
• The bibliography
• You have written in good clear English. Please proof your texts and ensure that punctuation and spelling are accurate.
Portfolio Pass/Fail to include the following and handed in at the end of week 14:

sample review

War Horse – review The Guardian Thurs 12 January 2012 by Peter Bradshaw
Spielberg’s version of the equine First World War yarn is an unconvincing attempt at summoning up the spirit of the time

Suffused in a buttery-digital glow, as if shot on special film made of liquid fudge, Steven Spielberg’s disappointing, coercively sentimental version of War Horse has

a baffling, soulless, artificial look. This is the story of young Albert Narracott, played by newcomer Jeremy Irvine, the son of tough West Country farming folk Ted

and Rose (Peter Mullan and Emily Watson). He is so passionately devoted to their horse, Joey, that when the poor beast is sold off to the army in 1914, Albert lies

about his age to join up, on a desperate mission to find Joey, and is destined for a heart-stopping reunion with his beloved horse on the field of battle itself.
I had hoped that this movie would combine ET-Spielberg and Saving-Private-Ryan-Spielberg in a massive double-whammy. Neither is forthcoming. The director’s lack of

real feeling for the locale or the era could not be more obvious. When the camera initially swoops over those rolling fields of Devon, in their supersaturated shades

of green, it might as well be Kentucky, or County Tipperary, or an unexplored moon of Tatooine. And all the time, John Williams’s orchestral score insistently jabs and

prods us, so we know when to laugh, when to be scared, when to feel sad.
Michael Morpurgo’s original novel is narrated by Joey himself in an interior monologue; the National theatre stage version by Tom Morris and Marianne Elliott boldly

sidestepped this by theatrically recreating Joey’s world and making the horses stylised bamboo-figures. The Spielberg movie, within its realist conventions, can of

course do neither, so the horses can only look eerily human in their pointedly clear reactions at key moments, as if they are on the point of speaking out, like the

pig from Babe.
The battle scenes are heartfelt, but do not take us far from cliche, and are notable chiefly for Spielberg’s repeated and squeamish reluctance to show the moment of

death itself. The one moment at which the film relaxes and comes alive, however, is the famous no-man’s-land sequence in which a British and German soldier quarrel

over who gets to keep Joey: nicely done, and good performances from Toby Kebbell and Hinnerk Schönemann.
I can only agree with those many bloggers pointing out that Curtis, in co-writing the final Blackadder episode on TV, set on the Western Front, once created a

genuinely brilliant and passionate First World War drama. This isn’t in the same league. It has moments of poignancy, and Tom Hiddleston is convincing as the decent

Captain Nicholls, who promises to look after Joey. But this War Horse is a pre-packaged brand, rather than a movie.

sample review

The Descendants (15)

The comedy of male inadequacy is Alexander Payne’s gift to film. He has made the subject his own to an almost lacerating degree – Matthew Broderick’s threatened

schoolteacher in Election, Jack Nicholson’s peevish pensioner in About Schmidt, Paul Giamatti’s failed writer (and flailing drinker) in his last film, Sideways. Payne

sees these men for the pathetic specimens they are, but they are never just pathetic; at some point they begin to understand that, despite their shortcomings, they are

capable of fine feeling too. Their journey is booby-trapped with upsets and humiliations – one might call it Payneful – but they do get through it.
The story goes that the studio tried to get George Clooney cast in Sideways. Payne resisted, and you feel very glad that he did. It’s not just that Giamatti and Thomas

Haden Church were unimprovable as the mismatched friends; it’s also that Payne could save up the star name for something better suited to his talent. That something is

The Descendants, in which Clooney locates a character interestingly poised between baffled decency and profound hurt. He plays Matt King, a Hawaiian lawyer and

landowner who’s been blindsided by fate: his wife, seriously injured in a boating accident, lies in a coma, and the doctor has told him that she may never wake up.

Matt must help his two daughters through the crisis, though being (in his own words) “the back-up parent, the understudy” he’s got some catching up to do. Ten-year-old

Scottie (Amara Miller) and sulky teenager Alexandra (Shailene Woodley) aren’t going to make it easy for him. “Did you just spank me?” says Alex, half-aghast, half-

amused at his tentative bottom tap, and sure enough he never tries it again.
For Matt, sorrows come, as Shakespeare observed, “not single spies, but in battalions”. In between visits to the hospital he discovers that his wife was having an

affair, a fact shocking enough without the extra reminder of how far he’s taken his eye off the ball. It’s an indication of his willingness to look silly, just as his

running obsessive in Burn after Reading showed him willing to look empty-headed. Payne, though, gives the actor some great moments to offset his ungainliness,

sometimes by simply holding the camera on his face as he absorbs the extent of the mess he’s in. Late in the film, standing alone at his wife’s bedside, Clooney

carries off one of the most moving scenes in his career, voice almost broken as he holds in his grief. It’s a sensitive and mature characterisation of a man who’s been

found wanting in both sensitivity and maturity.
The Descendants is a frustrating experience, because all the great things about Payne – his urbane irony, his wrong-footing wit, his brilliance with actors – are

present but not properly gelling. Alongside Clooney’s performance, Shailene Woodley is a stand-out, alternating spiky adolescent attitude with a more self-conscious

“grown-up” flexibility; perhaps if the movie had been more about these two it might have found a better balance. (Clooney’s rapport with younger actresses can be

terrific – see him also opposite Anna Kendrick in Up in the Air.) As it is, there’s a slight clunk of sitcom predictability in its moves. It is intelligent, and

humane, and pretty likeable; it isn’t special, though, and that’s what you hope and expect an Alexander Payne movie to be.