Arts Reviews & How to Write Them

Whether your passion is film, music, books, visual arts, or the stage, you can get closer to it as a reviewer and establish a career in one of the most influential roles open to a writer. A great review can be read by millions, and writing it calls for a high degree of skill. Based on a lifelong passion, packed into a few hundred words, and often written in less than an hour, a review makes heavy demands on a writer’s technique and experience. This book explains how to seize readers’ attention and how to be witty always, fascinating most of the time, and bitchy when you need to be.

Reviews from classic writers like Pauline Kael or Kenneth Tynan are contrasted with today’s hot names such as Mark Kermode and Stewart Maconie. The history of the critic is examined, including some of the groundbreaking groups who have shaped our culture—including Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table, the French New Wave directors who founded Les Cahiers du Cinema, and London’s celebrated Modern Review. Interviews with successful journalists and commissioning editors from the NME and The Guardian about breaking into the field are also included.