Transition Times: Louise Holden has some tips on reviewing films, in our SchoolMag guide

Last year's entries for the Irish Times SchoolMag competition contained hundreds of film reviews. Students critiqued blockbusters, art-house films and classics. One of the winning articles was a review of Hotel Rwanda, in which the author gave a very personal and honest response to the film and the horrors it portrayed.

If you plan to include film reviews in your school magazine, Hugh Linehan, who is The Irish Times's entertainment editor, has some advice.

"When you sit down to write, what are your objectives? Firstly, a review must be descriptive. What is the film about? What is the story? What genre is it? A comedy? An adventure? A horror movie? Some combination of genres? Description is one of the trickiest tasks for the reviewer. You must give your reader some sense of what happens in the film, but you don't want a dreary repetition of the plot, which benefits nobody. And you really don't want to commit the cardinal sin of giving away crucial plot twists and turns: readers rightly hate this."

Here are some more tips for great film reviewing.

• Go and see the film early, before everyone else has seen it and formed their own opinions.

• Pay attention to the elements of the film that audiences often don't notice, such as the camerawork, editing and music.

• Compare the film to works by the same director, the performances to works by the same actors. In short, know your films.

• Don't just slam a movie: explain where and why it fails.

• Think about the structure of your review before you start.

• Keep it simple and don't go on too long.

• Edit ruthlessly.

• Start and finish with a punchy line.

If you are planning your magazine's film section, find out what films are being released over the next couple of months. You can do this from one of the many monthly film magazines, from websites such as the Internet Movie Database (www.imdb.com) or, more simply, by cutting out and keeping one of Michael Dwyer's regular seasonal previews, which appear every few months in The Ticket.

Next week: editing a letters page