A corpus-based genre analysis of movie reviews on websites

Online movie reviews serve as crucial sources of information for moviegoers when making decisions, yet little is known about the format and writing style employed in these reviews. This study aims to investigate the rhetorical move patterns in the genre of online movie reviews from two well-known websites, namely Metacritic and RogerEbert.com. Additionally, the study seeks to explore the frequent usage of lexical bundles in each move to determine the most commonly employed three-word lexical bundles in this genre. The main objectives of this research are to provide a deeper understanding of the functioning of online movie reviews, conduct linguistic analysis, and examine the various communication functions used within the discourse. The corpus for this study comprises 30 movie reviews sourced from Metacritic and RogerEbert.com. Each review falls within the range of 600 to 1,300 words and specifically focuses on drama movies released between 2018 and 2022, either in theaters or through online streaming. To analyze the data regarding rhetorical moves, the framework proposed by De Jong and Burgers (2013) has been applied. AntConc was utilized to identify the most frequently occurring three-word lexical bundles in each move, with concordance lines presented for reference. The findings of the study indicate that Move 4 is the most commonly used move in online movie reviews, followed by Move 2 in second place. Moves 3 and 1 appear in the corpus in the subsequent order, while Move 5 is utilized only to a limited extent, serving the purpose of informing the viewer about the film.