In our daily lives we deal with many genres, and film reviews are one of them. Nevertheless, although cinema is a subject of general interest, there is a significant lack of research on film reviews in the area of genre analysis. Therefore, the present study aims to contribute to bridging this gap, by attempting to understand the functioning of film reviews in Portuguese, in terms of their rhetorical organization and their authors’ evaluation of the films, drawing on the fact that evaluation is one of the reasons that we read film reviews. Twenty reviews were selected from both non-specialized and specialized publications, including electronic magazines, a common source of film reviews nowadays. The rhetorical organization of film reviews was studied, based on the model proposed by Motta-Roth (1995) for academic book reviews, which was in turn inspired by John Swales’ (1990) analytical approach to research article introductions. The application of this model to our corpora showed that the communicative purposes of film reviews are: description, interpretation and evaluation. In addition to the regularities which characterize the rhetorical movements and steps of the genre, the study also examined the semantic resources of appraisal in the texts. The aim was to observe how reviewers evaluate a film and position themselves in relation to what they evaluate. In order to deal with this aspect of reviews, we chose Appraisal Theory, as described by James Martin and his colleagues (Martin and White, 2005; Martin and Rose, 2007), so as to classify the resources and articulate them with the evaluative rhetorical moves that were found. In both analyses, we compared the results obtained between corpora, in an attempt to observe possible differences between the two types of publications. The systemic functional view on which Martin’s model is based is anchored in Halliday (2004) and served as a bridge to understanding the interpersonal relationships established in the type of discourse examined here. For that purpose, we also interviewed readers, reviewers and editors, as they are the discourse community which produces and consumes film reviews. Their view of the genre is relevant as it situates them in the communicative context of which they are a part, thus establishing the social side of the genre. Finally, the results obtained demonstrate a difference between types of publications, as far as both text organization and evaluation are concerned. Our conclusions point to, first, the major importance of the purposes of description and interpretation together over that of evaluation in both types of media, and, second, the stronger expression of evaluation, particularly in specialized publications.