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.
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).
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
