The purpose of this paper is to examine the discursive construction of persuasiveness in media language on the basis of the genre ‘film review,’ which is relatively rarely analysed. Thanks to a study of eighty reviews for three popular French comedies “Intouchables” (2011), “Qu’est-ce qu’on a fait au Bon Dieu?” (2014) and “Le sens de la fête” (2017) several invariant persuasive traits of this kind of discourse can be described in the context of its demonstrative (epideictic) and deliberative (legislative) dimensions. These dimensions exploit the rhetorical parameters of movere and delectare related to the conative function of language combined with the phatic one. Since the use of the mentioned strategies stems from the need for film reviewers to attract and convince the addressee to see a film or not, they reflect some persuasive techniques of advertising discourse, which aim to influence one’s will and decisions. Therefore, the paper elaborates on a set of discursive strategies of persuasion (DSP), leading to dynamise and dialogise the discourse in order to reinforce or weaken the addressee’s attitude towards the presented film by means of evaluative lexis including colloquial expressions, superlatives, questions and appellative-directive forms. All these elements refer to shared values, connotation, presupposition, and the identification relationship in order to ‘lock’ the addressee in the discursive universe created by the addresser.
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