Film Magazines and Reviews

A film magazine is, in general, the best place to find 3rd party, professional reviews of new or upcoming films. While online can provide free film reviews they are often not in depth, and so film magazines are a key source of which to gain information on films on. Film magazines generally come in three different formats:

• Consumer magazines, ie. Total Film, Empire
• Academic magazines, ie. Sight & Sound
• In-house magazines, ie. Odeon, Vue

A consumer magazine is something that the general public are expected to buy. As such they are less in depth, more casual in nature, and focused towards reviewing the enjoyment of the movie for the general public. These magazines will review commercial cinema films that people are expected to watch casually, unless it is a themed magazine such as Sci-Fi which will review films under a certain category, but still focus on commercial releases.

  Academic magazines are focused more on people who have a job in film, are film students or are filmophiles. They go further in depth into films, often analysing the entire film and its techniques and technical details, often making references to papers written on it. These magazines will often assume you've already seen the film and summarise the full plot in its analysis. Academic publications put larger focus on less well-known films, such as foreign and arthouse cinema, rather than commercially available films, due to the nature of the publication.

 Finally, an in-house magazine is the free publication available in the cinema itself. Unlike the consumer and academic magazines, an in-house magazine is trying to sell the film to it's potential audience. As such, it contains no criticism whatsoever, focusing only on the movie's strengths and sidestepping anything deemed negative. this makes the in-house magazines unreliable as a source of reviews.

The main film magazines in the UK are Empire, Total Film and Sight & Sound, as well as the in-house magazines. Each one makes use of different layouts to address different audiences. I will be analysing Empire in detail and referring to it's layout to distinguish between the magazines.

Empire is the most typical of the three, and it makes use of several layout conventions that also appear in the other publications. The main focus of the article is on the image, which takes up half of the page. This is the image used to sum up the film, and as such has to make use of different elements to distinguish the intention of the image. We can see, for example, that this is a horror film from the dark lighting and flashlight. In-house cinemas generally make this image larger to utilise fewer words, while Sight & Sound will make the writing the focus of the article and keep the image smaller. The image is also accompanied by a caption, which in publications such as Empire would be a joke about the image. Sight & Sound is more serious in tone, and while it might make a light joke it will often be an analysis of the picture itself. In all publications, a section title will be used in order to inform what part of the magazine the reader is in and easily distinguish what type of article they are reading.

The next aspects are the Headline and the Strapline. In Empire, the Headline seen is that of the film title (since this is a review), while the strapline is a pun on the title. In Total Film, this strapline would usually be a summary of the review while still retaining humour, while an in-house magazine would generally make the strapline a positive overview of the film. Sight & Sound, however, would have an individual title for the article itself whilst using the strapline as an outline of the following article.

The important section of the article, the main text, can also tell us about the magazine's attempts to attract audiences. For example, Empire makes use of 4 columns in its review to make the writing look somewhat accessible - in a main article, this column count is reduced to three to draw attention to the articles they want the viewer to read. Total Film makes use of two columns in its articles to make it look easily accessible, while Sight & Sound will use four most of the time. With the use of less columns an article can look more or less accessible - an article with no columns looks difficult to read and can make people avoid reading them. In addition, text types are used in different circumstances for different reasons. Serif fonts (ie. Times New Roman) are used in main texts because they help the eye along the sentence, and as such make something easier to read. Sans-serif fonts (ie. Helvetica) are used in headers and largened portions of text because they are bold and stand out to the reader. An important part of the main text is also the Byline, which credits the author of the piece. Depending on their importance, their position might change; Empire and Total Film have the credit at the end while Sight & Sound puts them at the head of the article. An in-house magazine will not credit the author at all.

We also see in the article the use of breakout boxes - these help something stand out amongst the rest of the article and attract the audience's attention. Here we see it being used to highlight a summary of the credits of the film and a plot synopsis. Another box highlights a quote from the article, purposefully left open to try and get the viewer to read the full article. In other publications the breakout boxes might be used for other purposes; in Total Film, the breakout boxes are often used for their 'Predicted Interest Curve' graphs and their 'See This If You Liked...' boxes. In this example we see the use of graphics in a magazine review, catching the viewer's eye with colourful, attractive areas that stand out and draw the eye in. A graphic may also be used to fill space if the article has white areas, so as to make it look full - for example, the yellow strip next to the credits breakout box.