Color reversal films incorporate design factors to optimize their performance across all features important to customers who use the film. One important customer featureis film acutance, a measure of the film's ability to clearly record fine detail. This article quantitatively describes the benefits of several essential film architecture tools used to manage exposure and processing effects on film acutance. Among the factors described are light management by absorber dyes, interlayer filter dyes, film thickness, and silver halide content in the yellow color record. Alsodescribed are emulsion bulk iodide influences on chemical acutance effects. Some acutance performance tradeoffs with other film features are described. The quantitative importance of these tools depends strongly on particular emulsion optical and chemical influences in any given film. In general, the cyanrecord shows the strongest acutance dependence on film properties related to light scatter and reflection because of its position near the bottom of the film multilayer stack. Absorber dyes and interlayer filter dyes improve cyan and magenta record acutance at the expense of photographic speed. Emulsion bulk iodide tunes IIE effects and delivers a corresponding influence on the chemical aspects of film acutance under a white light exposure, although many other factors also influence these behaviors.