Review Writing: analysis of text
Below are the initial paragraphs from two reviews, one for a film and one for a mobile phone, which share some similarities.
With 2004’s espionage sequel The Bourne Supremacy, director Paul Greengrass changed the face of popcorn thrillers, combining the docudrama grit of Bloody Sunday with super-slick thrills that left the Bond franchise in the dust. So successful were the Bourne movies that when Greengrass and leading man Matt Damon walked away from the Robert Ludlum-inspired series after the perfect ending of 2007’s The Bourne Ultimatum, the studio cooked up The Bourne Legacy, an empty actioner with a gaping hole where its star and soul should be, idly trading on the memory of past glories.
Now Damon and Greengrass are back with Jason Bourne, a breathlessly confident thriller with a self-consciously modern edge that casts its antihero adrift in a post-Snowden world of surveillance and social media. Replete with heated exchanges about the pay-off between personal privacy and public order, the new movie combines fist-fighting with cyber-stalking in impressively ruthless fashion, barrelling through its contemporary landscape like a cinematic bull in a rolling-news china shop.
One of my favourite recurring bits at iPhone introductions is when Phil Schiller notes, correctly, that the iPhone camera is likely the best camera most people will ever own. This is an incredible fact, as is the fact that a huge number of people now quietly upgrade to a better camera on a fairly regular basis, and then use the hell out of that camera. The explosion in mobile photography is one of the most revolutionary aspects of the entire smartphone revolution, and the general excellence of the iPhone camera over time is a big reason why.
Read the full articleThe iPhone 7 represents another upgrade over the iPhone 6S: there’s a new, faster f/1.8 lens, the addition of optical image stabilization, a new four-colour True Tone flash, and wider colour capture. This all adds up to a decent improvement, but the iPhone 6S was already operating at the top of the scale. But compared to the iPhone 6S, the iPhone 7 is a step improvement, not a major leap.
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