I recently taught a group of doctoral students critical review. The first stage is to summarise the text. The next stage is to critique it and answer any additional questions your critiquing process raises. Then organise your evaluation of pros and cons into two lists in the order of the paper, then put all this information together in a draft review, then finally revise your draft and include additional relevant literature. I used a short example in the class. My review of this paper is about to be published.
It's not quite published yet. I would like to write a study guide on the process, maybe once the paper is published. I have spoken about it at an internal conference.
Understand the paper and summarize it. Criticize constructively and address the anomalies raised by your constructive criticisms. Build up the paper in an organized and synchronized manner and support your inputs with more current references.
I think the answers address three different meanings of "review paper". One is a research paper which provides a critical synthesis of existing research on one aspect of the field. Han Ping Fung had a useful link there. But I would add that it is crucial to have really good search routines and criteria in place, as the quality of the review also hangs on having included as much as possible of the relevant research.
The second is a literature review for a PhD study or as backdrop to a regular research paper. I am not sure if that is what Peter Samuels refers to as he writes about 'the text' not 'the research papers'. Nonetheless, I believe that what he writes is highly applicable. It is about making clear not just what a good literature review (section) looks like, but also making explicit the steps in producing one. I would stress that the summary of each paper should focus on the results, but note the scope and any validity issues, so the synthesis can give different weight to different papers.
The third is to write a review of one paper, for instance for an assignment. I am not sure if that is what Nyakno jimmy George had in mind.
Perhaps useful to clarify which of these one is thinking of.