Thanks to online ratings, it's easier than ever to know if a movie is worth watching or not. A quick Google search shows many websites offering their opinions on the latest movies. 5 Guides to Understanding Movies and Appreciating Movies 5 Guides to Understanding Movies and Appreciating Movies What's a good movie for you? Learn why some movies are better than others and how they keep us entertained with these great movie educational guides. Read more.
The three most popular are IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes, and Metacritic. But how are these three sites different, and which ones should you trust to get the skinny on movies? Here's everything you need to know..
The Internet Movie Database is a gigantic compendium of movies, TV shows, and video games. Its main use is to find detailed information about any actor, producer or piece of content.
Pick up a movie and you'll see a synopsis, trailers, photos, a cast list, trivia, and more. What makes IMDb so useful is its cross referencing. When you open the page for an actor, you will see the most popular roles of that actor. Therefore, IMDb is ideal for those “what else have I seen on?” moments.
If you sign up for a free IMDb account, you can create a Watchlist of the movies you want to see The best movies you haven't seen on these trusted lists The best movies you haven't seen on these trusted lists Do you pick the best movies based on reviews? Or do you go for popular taste? Sometimes you'll want to go on the "best of" list. Here are six lists of the best "best movies." Read more . Doing this also allows you to leave comments, which are displayed on a 10-point scale for each movie. We've Covered More IMDb Features 7 IMDb Features You May Have Overlooked 7 IMDb Features You May Have Overlooked There's a lot more to IMDb than ratings and cast lists. Here are some useful IMDb features you may have missed. Read More
Unlike the other two sites below, IMDb reviews come solely from users. It only takes a minute to log into IMDb and leave a comment, so there are few barriers to entry.
So IMDb's biggest strength is that the score gives you a good idea of what normal consumers think of it. Professional critics have no influence on IMDb scores.
IMDb has a weighted average system to prevent users from manipulating the score, but exactly how it does this is unknown.
IMDb's biggest problem is that, like other platforms, most people only leave reviews if they love or hate a movie. Therefore, this skews the scores in favor of fanboys or haters. People who want to improve the perception of a movie will probably rate the movie out of 10, while those who didn't like it will give it a rating of one.
Rotten Tomatoes is a trusted source for movie reviews from critics. Every movie uses the Tomatometer to rate the quality of a movie. If critics liked the film, a red tomato appears for their review. When they don't like it, you'll see a green symbol instead.
As long as 60 percent or more of critics like the film, it earns an overall Fresh rating. Score with a red tomato. If 59 percent or less of critics rate the film favorably, it wins a Rotten Score with a green splat. A Fresh Certificate A badge appears for films that have at least a 75 percent favorable score after 80 reviews, including at least five major critics.
Open any movie's page and you'll see the overall score plus its average rating and the total number of reviews. The Critical Consensus , Present for most movies, is a great summary of why the movie received its score.
Rotten Tomatoes also provides a user score, shown by the popcorn bucket. If the public rated it above 3.5 stars (out of 5) on average, it shows a full bucket. A tipping bucket represents an average of less than 3.5. You can basically treat this the same as the IMDb score.
At the bottom of a movie's page, you can read excerpts from critical reviews, filter by newness or rottenness, or just show the top critics. Search for your favorite actors and you can see the scores of the movies they appeared in.
Rotten Tomatoes has the benefit of getting its reviews from trusted critics. Its criteria page explains that the site only gets reviews from the top 100 major newspapers, magazines, and websites. In theory, this means that only the opinions of the most trusted film critics influence the Rotten Tomatoes review.
The top crit designation allows you to filter by the absolute best crits if you prefer. You can't get a more professional opinion than these people.
Overall, Rotten Tomatoes does a good job of letting you know at a glance whether or not a movie is worth your time. Easily identifiable icons, overall score, and consensus summary only take a second to scan.
The biggest problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it breaks down complex opinions into a Yes or No Punctuation. List a critic who thought the movie was decent but had some flaws (for example, a 59 percent rating), as well as one who thought the movie was absolute rubbish Worst Movies You Can Watch on Netflix Right Now Worst Movies that you can watch Netflix right now Let's face it, there is some joy in watching a really terrible movie every now and then. Fortunately, there are plenty of bad movies available to watch on Netflix. Read More (a score of 0 percent).
You will notice this with the Average Score below the score. Take Jumanji:Welcome to the Jungle. as an example. Of the 179 comments, 136 of them were positive. This gives the film a score of 76 percent. However, critics rated the film an average of 6.1/10, well below the 76 percent shown on the page.
This doesn't mean Rotten Tomatoes scores are useless, of course. But it's important to remember that there are nuances to individual reviews, and the Fresh/Rotten system turns each rating into a score out of 100 or 0.
Metacritic aggregates reviews of movies and TV shows, as well as video games and music albums. It's an important metric in the gaming world, but it can also give you a good idea about the quality of movies.
The site collects reviews from many sources and aggregates them on a metascore from 0 to 100. It displays a color and one line quality indication based on the overall score:
Unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic uses a weighted average system. No one knows the exact details, but the service places more weight on some sources than others. Like the other two sites, Metacritic also includes a user rating.
Metacritic avoids Rotten Tomatoes' problem of simply rating each review "good" or "bad." A 50% revision is mixed with the rest to create the metascore. Therefore, the score seen on Metacritic is closer to the average review, as opposed to the percentage of critics who liked the film on Rotten Tomatoes.
Also, among these three sites, Metacritic is the only one that offers full user reviews alongside critics. This makes it easy to compare what the general public thinks compared to professionals.
While it's easy to translate a score from a five-star or 10-point scale, the way Metacritic translates the letter rating is questionable. We can see how this works on the About Metascores page:
While scoring a UNA Since 100 percent makes sense, look at the second- scores. and F . A score of 67 percent for a second- It seems a bit harsh. In most schools, a score of 67 percent is closer to an F of what is a second- . And scoring an F like 0 percent seems unfair.
Something like 20 percent for an F would be more appropriate. Because each site has different rating scales (some may not use pros and cons), this could distort a reviewer's original meaning.
Also, unlike Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic seems to have few public standards. There is no detailed information on where his critics come from. So the score potentially doesn't have as much weight behind it as Rotten Tomatoes.
So, we have now looked at what each of these sites has to offer, along with their pros and cons. As you may have guessed, there is no one website that is best for everything. However, we can recommend each of these sites for different reasons:
Of course, there's nothing wrong with checking all three sites every time you think about watching a movie. Over time, you should find out which sites' tastes match yours, and then you'll know which one is best for you personally.
Remember that movie scores aren't everything. All three of these sites, for example, don't show an accurate picture of movies that are so bad they're good. They torture you with the top 10 bad movies on Netflix. You torture yourself with the top 10 bad movies on Netflix. in the mood to torture yourself, start by watching the top 10 bad movies we can find on Netflix. They are so bad that they can be really good. Or not. Read more . Because those movies are objectively terrible, they have low ratings even though they have ironic value.
Furthermore, it is impossible to summarize complex opinions of dozens of people in a single number. And no matter what the critics or the general public think, their preferences may be totally different anyway. These sites are helpful, but don't take them as law.
If you prefer to get opinions from certain people, you can check out the reviews on these YouTube channels for movie lovers. 10 Essential YouTube Channels for Movie Lovers. YouTube channels for more trailers, reviews, analysis, and bugs than you'll ever need. Read more too.
