This really hurts when you go watch a movie with lots of good reviews, find it not enjoyable or a good movie at all, and then question whether everyone else is stupid or that you are in fact the local idiot.
this post was submitted on 30 Oct 2023
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If you're looking at critics reviews, you have to be careful when you see a lot of good reviews for a movie. A 100% on rotten tomatoes is more likely to be a boring slog of art that only a movie critic who is desperate for something different can enjoy than something the average person wants to see.
My rule of thumb: if a movie you were excited for got amazing reviews then go see it. If are just browsing a list of top rated movies currently in theaters and you haven't heard of it, do more research to figure out why it's well rated. At least you'll know what you're in for if you do go see it.
90+ on Metacritic may be what you’re thinking of, those can be more arty films that may or may not appeal to non-critics. 100% on Rotten Tomatoes is usually the opposite, crowd-pleasers that appeal to all audiences. Nothing amazing or groundbreaking, but a movie pretty much anyone will at least enjoy.
Since RT is just saying what percentage of critics thought it was watchable, high RT percentages just indicate universal enjoyment, they don’t say anything about HOW good the reviewer thinks the movie is.
Two great examples to illustrate this point:
I'm thinking of ending things (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/im_thinking_of_ending_things), 82% critic score, 49% audience score. This movie takes "it makes you think" to a whole new dimension. It's two hours and fourteen minutes of melancholic confusion, wondering if you missed something important, then it's over without ever really resolving anything. You're on your own to connect the dots and make sense of the movie, or more likely you'll have to do additional research to figure out what the plot actually was. I don't regret watching it, but I also can't recommend it.
Red Notice (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/red_notice), 39% critic score, 92% audience score. Bland, forgettable plot with cool effects. Explosions, The Rock, Gal Gadot, and Ryan Reynolds. A fun, enjoyable movie to stream on a weeknight, but not something I would have paid to see in theaters.
But super helpful when I am looking for that boring slog!
It has nothing to do with intelligence, it's entirely personal taste.
How I feel about any recent Chris Nolan.
Dude. Watched Oppenheimer and posted review stating that people should go see it , butt..........
People got pissed. His movies are getting worse.
The prestige is my christopher Nolan movie.
I love the prestige, but Interstellar was his best work in my opinion. Definitely gone downhill since then, although I still enjoyed Oppenheimer. Tenet hurt my soul
Tenet hurt my soul
As someone who watched Primer and Tenet back-to-back (both first-time viewings), I am amazed that a film produced on an astronomically higher budget than the other could be twice as confusing, twice as long (!), and so much more exhausting because of the story's reliance on world-ending stakes.
Hot take, but Chris Nolan is the master of making films that feel smart but are actually pretty dumb. He's like Zack Snyder but he's good enough at pulling it off that his movies are a hit with critics. People who tend to overestimate their own intelligence will often hold Nolan in high esteem. He's also a cryptofacist.
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The left is Rotten Tomatoes which I usually my go-to. The relative % of critic and user ratings let me know what. Getting into. If both are high it's a well made blockbuster, critic high user low is thought provoking, critic low user high is the Walmart lowest denominator slapstick, action, or romcom, and both low is trash like Freddie Got Fingered or The Room.
The other is Letterboxd, a social movie review platform, that I've never used but I can imagine it would make my peenus hort.
Solid analysis of rotten tomatoes scores. The comparison between critic/user reviews says so much more than the scores themselves.
trash like Freddie Got Fingered
FGF is a masterpiece of comedic cinema, sir.
So is The Room.
Yeah, and even if both ratings are low, it can still be enjoyable to watch for you.
The only real way to know if a movie is good, is to watch it yourself.
Barring just watching EVERYTHING, which nobody has time for, you should follow movie critics that share your sensibilities.
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Screw movie reviews, watch the trailer (unless you're stupid anti spoiler like myself) or find a recommendation site/individual reviewer that vibes with you, would you trust half the population to have similar taste to yourself, no? Well there goes half the ratings right away.
Tbh if you watch a trailer you've already seen the good parts so just mark it off your list.
Streaming services and movie theaters hate this one weird trick!
If all the good parts can fit into a trailer, it's already an awful movie, though 🤷
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Amazon reviews:
"I haven't received it yet but I'm sure it will be good." 5 stars
"UPS damaged the box." 1 star
"I bought the wrong size, they were too small." 1 star
Yelp reviews:
"Restaurant wouldn't seat us at 6pm on Valentine's day without a reservation." 1 star
Letterboxd is pretentious, which is a good way to find ✨cinema✨, but if you just want to turn your brain off and watch an Adam Sandler movie or something, letterboxd is not the platform to look at reviews
Unless you're reading the reviews to find silly shitposts
User reviews are trash. Most people have no idea what makes a movie "good" or "bad".
At the same time, people drastically conflate "good" with "entertaining". Most of my favorite movies are not "good"
Transformers, all of them. Love those movies, but they're not getting academy awards.
My favorite is people who complain about them because they're not believable. Yes, the movie with the robots from outer space didn't stick to science 100% of the time.
I have the same gripe with video games. Who cares if it's not historically accurate that there's a woman fighting? Guess what Tommy, none of us fought in World War 2 either!
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It's all subjective. The only way a critic can be helpful is if you become accustomed to their tastes and how they communicate them. It's why Rotten Tomatoes CAN be a helpful tool but is so misunderstood as to be useless.
If a movie gets 10% on RT, but you're in the 10% that fucking love that thing then that score means nothing.
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I mean, it's entirely subjective. I tend to trust audience scores more than critic scores personally.
Remember the movie critics said the fnaf movie was bad, movie goers said it was great.
Five Nights at Freddy's
I read the whole comment thread trying to figure out what fnaf meant...
Gotta agree with the critics on that one.
If you enjoyed that movie, I'm happy for you. But that was easily the worst movie I've ever seen.
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I'm a FNAF fan, and as a movie its quality is that of a straight to DVD movie. It has major flaws that I could go into incredible length about, but the more I think about it, the more I like it as is. The lore of the games is campy, and all over the place, as well as cliché in many places. The series never took itself too seriously while managing to make goofy characters feel mildly threatening. The FNAF movie captures this campy B movie plot excellently.
Really, the major draw for me was that I had invested my emotions into a community that formed as a result of the creator embracing his fans and doing his best to give them what they wanted, even if he wasn't the best at it. The community never really cared that the lore was imperfect, they cared because they felt like they could invest themselves in the story because there was another game of uncovering the hidden story after they finished playing each game. It brought people together because everyone had their own takes on the story. It was super exciting to have each game show up because then you'd have more people with their own takes on the story and big personalities making videos having fun with a goofy game series.
Seeing the movie felt like a huge love letter to the whole experience. I wanted to see these goofy and campy machines on the big screen because they already occupied a space in my imagination. As a fan, I went in with the perfect level of expectation, I expected a campy B movie that would be fun to watch and not take too seriously, and its exactly what I got. In fact, there was a level of fan service in the film which made me absolutely delighted to watch it.
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My peenus dont hort
5/5
I check through RT, IMDB, Google Reviews, Letterboxd and average them all out.
You have to dig into RTs reviews and look at the critics average and the audience average (you can often find a film with 80% critic approval and 20% audience approval .... and the site will only post the critics rating)
When doing your research ... also look at the number of votes ... if 100 members voted 90% chances are those are all movie production promoters boosting numbers. IMDB usually has higher numbers of votes for everything which gives a more reasonable average.
I get what you're saying, but IMO a 2 hour movie is too low stakes to warrant spending more than a minute or two glancing at reviews, which is why RT and IMDB are nice, even if the summary score isn't totally reliable.
Am I interested in it from a quick synopsis or trailer?
Are the reviews generally at least mixed or better?
If the answer to both those is Yes, there's a good enough chance I'll enjoy it to give it a shot.
My favorite are the three/four minute action sci-fi trailers ..... you basically get to watch a two hour film in four minutes.
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I think the main problem is that a single value score means different things to different people. Most people think it means "entertaining", film nerds think "original", cineasts think, well, I don't know actually, but I'd imagine a sum of technical aspects.
One solution would be to split up the rating into aspects, another to filter ratings according to similarity in preferences. None of these are perfect though and the latter may even be another social media trap with all kinds of inherent problematics.
My workaround is to have a quick glance at the different review boards I know for their audience and weigh the scores to the type of movie if it's worth a two hour investment of time or not.
Personally I came to the conclusion a long time ago that there is no reason for me to rate movies for how faux objectively "good" they are. I don't rate movies for anybody else. I rate them to keep track of what I've seen from people in the production. I try to give it some context, but ultimately it's an entirely subjective rating for myself.
Counterpoint: Movie "Critics" are supposed to be the ones who judge movie on how well made it is rather than their personal taste. Roger Ebert disliked a lot of films but didn't deduct the scores because of it.
Funko critics on RT are not qualified to be critics.
I always gave Ebert credit for his review philosophy. Like you said, he would review a slasher movie and he said he didn't care for them but he would review it from the angle of slasher movies and if it was a good slasher movie. He seemed to have a strange hangup on nudity even though he wrote the script for "Valley of the Dolls." For instance, he didn't like "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" because Jennifer Jason Leigh had a nude scene.
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Five nights at fnaf
That Disney's hill guy really seems to like Disney movies
I've learned to watch a movoe if I want to watch it because reviews will usually ruin that movie for me
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