Movie / TV reviews are such a shit show. I rarely find myself agreeing with the averaged out rating.
These days I’ll just make sure the rating is above say 30 and beyond that I’ll rely on trailers and reading actual reviews. But finding new movies and tv shows to watch is quite a chore as a result.
I hope someday soon AI can be employed to give you real personalized recommendations that don’t suck. But realistically it’ll just be more shitty algorithms meant to serve the interests of the highest bidder.
I’ve also noticed the opposite effect. Where if a movie is leaning into being plain and easy to watch you’ll have critics rating it down cause they wanted it to do some artsy stuff. Definitely feels like critics are more on the artsy side of the scale, which is fine but doesn’t always align with what I’m looking for.
Honestly if they are close enough to what you like it can be manageable. A critic that knows enough about themselves to understand why people like things they don’t they can be very worthwhile.
Some critics notably just don’t like action movies. An action movie B for them is probably a solid A for most.
Also for as much hate as it gets, places like Pitchfork where critics actually speak their mind are important.
I’m thinking the world just needs more one-off prolific critics that really give you how they feel about things. It’s funny that IGN is talking here, as they are very well known for being paid off and using the 70-100 rating scale so they don’t piss anyone off.
The MCU having as many good scores as it does is the biggest giveaway that RT is influenced by money or connections. Like there’s no way in hell the MCU has THAT many good movies when most of them are boring AF.
However entertaining and fun the MCU has been at times, I’d say they’ve clearly gotten away with a lot when it comes to movie making. Like there are plenty of films in that franchise/cinematic-universe that just wouldn’t have cut it and would have died on the scrap heap as stand alone films. But the MCU glow kept them alive and folded them into the giant stream of MCU content.
Beyond that, I’d bet that the post-endgame stuff has been done objectively badly … like you could break it down into a number of poor movie/franchise making choices (like you can’t simply build a story out of “a multiverse”, it isn’t a character or plot idea, you need more). Love and Thunder was an awful film. Can anyone tell which characters are part of the story and which are being written out any more? Etc etc.
It’s all still popular though. Beyond that, your argument is a strawman … the MCU can be a give away (because, IMO, it has clearly made a number of missteps) without the question of popularity v quality being an issue.
Not really. Up until recently, most of the MCU was good to great. I’m not exactly sure where the shift happened, but a lot of the more recent ones have been trash. I’m talking about the secret invasions and black widows, where they’ve completely lost the script.
It already started slightly before Endgame - both Ant-Man and the Wasp, as well as Captain Marvel, weren’t great. After Endgame though it definitely fell off completely.
Kinda like season 7 and 8 of Game of Thrones. During season 7 we still had some hope left…
the critic reviews have always been complete dogshit. too many movies get 100% or 0% on rotten tomatoes.
if i’m not mistaken IMDB ratings are only user based, and in my opinion, i almost never disagree with IMDB ratings and i think it’s because it has a vastly larger voting group to get a more accurate viewer consensus even if a small number of critics give a 0/10 or 10/10
So what if they do? It’s anybody’s right to conduct a free transaction. If somebody wants to hire me to write a lovely review of their movie, why not? If I want to hire people to write some bad reviews about my competition, that’s a free transaction. Crazy communists want to exert big government control over the free review market.
Integrity means if you take money from somebody you do your best to write an excellent review. Also, be equal and fair, charge the same price to write a good review for Oppenheimer as you do to write a good review for Barbie. Take pride in your work and write good compelling reviews, people will pay you what you are worth.
I’ve never even been to Leningrad, I only know it from the Billy Joel tune.
I always just assumed that the badly rated ones might be legit but that the higher ones may have had a few bought off critics (because capitalism) here and there, but now I know I’m right.
Who would've thought that this was happening on a site with often massive disparities between Critic and Public reviews, almost always related to content with big marketing budgets.
The problem is that any review aggregator is wide open to manipulation, you just rely on the integrity of the reviewers, which has shown to be lacking.
I’d like a Fediverse version of IMDb but that’s another thing entirely.
The issue is that every site uses the same critics to aggregate scores from. That being said I like using metacritic since you can view it by audience rating, and excluding the anti-woke, incel brigades on some media it usually aligns pretty well with what score I’d personally give a movie.
Check out Letterboxd. But the star rating system is used a bit differently than you might be used to, like an average move will get a 3/5 stars, and that’s not a “bad” score. Just took me a bit getting used to
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