Learning the basics

I have had a thrilling first three days being a movie critic. The very first thing that I did was check out some past movie reviews written by famed critic Roger Ebert and others on his website. I saw it as vitally important to have an understanding for what a movie review should contain. After that, Zach and I jumped into our very first movie, the raunchy comedy Neighbors. This film has the crazy partying Delta Psi Beta, a fraternity, living next to a young couple and their daughter. It was a good movie to start off with as it was hilarious, but also had some flaws that I could exploit in my review.
The first review, which I wrote on the movie, took me much longer than I anticipated. I started out with a basic premise of the movie, then wrote the positives and negatives of how the fraternity was depicted. I thought I was done, until I realized I hadn't even started to critique the couple, who are some of the main characters in the film. After 550 or so words, I was happy with my review.
Late in the week, Zach and I had a meeting with our sponsor Christopher Ball, who reviews movies when they come out on DVD. He had a lot of insight to share with us, starting with what his job his and how he tries to maximize the number of movies he views each week. He said that he will watch 7 or 8 movies a week as to try to maximize the amount of reviews he can have published. Mr. Ball also provided a lot of insight on the writing of reviews. He said that it's important to establish the basics somewhere in the review, but one of the most important things is actually a good lead. It's important to not make people want to flip the page when they read the first couple lines of your review. Other than that, though, there is no formal structure for a review. It's important to keep it relaxed and not too serious. Sometimes he incorporates jokes into his own reviews. Lastly, he told Zach and I that with he will often write a review and then wait 3 to 4 days before going back to edit it. That way he can space himself from the piece and identify errors a few days later.