Rotten Tomato ratings are stupid.
With every review being either a 👍 or 👎, the most simple meh movie that nobody hates (or loves), gets a 100% fresh.
IMDb and Metacritic are much better.
I find Rotten Tomatoes much more useful. Knowing that 90% of critics gave a favorable review is infinitely more helpful for my decision to watch a movie than its IMDB score.
As long as you know what it is, consensus as to okay-ness or better, then it’s still a decent metric. Still, “universally okay” is not always what I’m after, nor is it quite the achievement the studios will proclaim.
If you’re inclined to take reviews seriously (and it’s a whole other discussion, but I very much believe criticism and analysis are worthwhile when done well in their own right) , still better to find a few sources whose takes tend to line up with your own.
That’s the thing, I don’t want to invest that time. If I’m looking at the rating of a movie, I’m already interested, I just need to know if I’m likely to enjoy it or not. Whether it’s rated 5.8, 6.1 or 6.4 doesn’t do anything for me at that point, whereas the RT score answers that question perfectly.
I honestly don’t find any number rating especially useful.
What I have found useful is to follow 3 or 4 specific movie critics, get to know their opinions and contrast them with my own. We’re never going to agree on every movie, but at least I’ll know why they liked or didn’t like it as a way to figure out if it’s worth my time.
Maybe instead of 1-dimensional number scales, we should move to something like 4 quadrants, where different movie qualities are represented?
Because rating a movie isn’t just like shit - meh - ok - great, but should be much more detailed.
This could represent something like how well it was done in different scales in one view, and I can choose what matches my mood.
Really good rated movies are sometimes also hard to follow/process, and a movie with a light mood won’t get those good ratings, but would still be exactly the thing I’m currently looking for.
So, I haven’t really thought this through, but if we create a more dimensional rating system, it would be maybe easier to find, what I’m really looking for.
This is more or less a shower thought, but I really think, that the problem lies in the one dimensional rating system, which cannot represent the multitude of experiences I want from a movie
They’re about general critic and public sentiment.
And for that, no movie should ever get a perfect 10. No movie could ever get a perfect 10.
They are useful for evaluating a movie’s actual quality. But quality has nothing to do with any individuals enjoyment of a movie.
Currently- Richard Roeper (Chicago Sun-Times), Justin Chang (L.A. Times) and J. Hoberman (Village Voice), although admittedly these days since I just sail the high seas most of the time, I often just go by the description and turn it off if I don’t like what I’m watching.
I used to know older critics better though. I was usually able to figure out whether or not a movie was worth watching by paying attention to Roger Ebert, Leonard Maltin and Pauline Kael (if she liked it, I probably wouldn’t).
