I disagree that critic reviews are inherently prescriptive. Major blockbusters rely on cliches for the same reason that supermarket chains spend ridiculous amounts of money trying to get every store to look and feel the same: people find familiarity comforting. But to people who watch thousands upon thousands of movies this gets astoundingly boring.

Take any hobby. Literally any one of them. The people who are really into it, whatever you are thinking about, will prefer different stuff from what casual fans like.

Why do people die from erotic self-asphyxiation? Because we have a compulsion to escalate and to push things further. We need novelty. We need new stuff. We go mad if it's just the same thing over and over. At least that's true for most of us. Not everyone takes it all that far, but when you invest a significant amount of time doing one thing in particular, you're always going to want to take it to greater heights.

And that's the thing about critic reviews: they represent movie fans suffering from the cinematic equivalent of erotic self-asphyxiation. Old, tired cliches and predictable plots? No. They want something they haven't seen before. Art movies are incredibly weird, and film critics love them.

Imagine your job is rating beers. And you think pilsners are fine but super boring. But people get incredibly mad at you for dissing their favorite pilsners, and they think you're a pretentious snob for recommending imperial stouts. And they want you to give super-high ratings to ... run of the mill pilsners. That's what I imagine it's like being a film critic.

> But to people who watch thousands upon thousands of movies this gets astoundingly boring.

I would say that there's so many different ways to appreciate films, so many different types of audiences, and such wildly different intentions behind the films and the critics who write about them. It seems reductive and a bit misguided, to me, for someone to write an article about the divergence between metascore and imdb ratings. It's comparing two gigantic blobs of scores and drawing straight lines through them. Does it actually say anything interesting? No in my opinion.

I mean, sure, the films with super-high metacritic scores are worth watching. They're a part of "the canon"-- although for the life of me I could never get through Citizen Kane. But a metacritic score is worth about as much as an imdb score. It's a blunt measurement.

The value of a well written review has little to do with "the score". Many include "a score" because they're forced to, but it's so much better to just pay attention to what the critic is actually saying in the review. It might speak to you if you're in the right headspace, and provide some insight into the film that you hadn't considered. They're typically more valuable to read AFTER you've seen the film. But if you find a writer you grok, you'll get some threads to pull on that will open up all kinds of film experiences you would have never had.

The value of an audience score is garbage, by itself, without any recommendation algorithm to match up your viewing habits and limit the pool of films presented to you. Even then, the high-scores mean almost nothing though the bottom-of-the-barrel low ones usually can be trusted to actually be bad.

You're not totally wrong.

But if I want to quickly decide if a movie is worth watching, looking up its IMDB score is a blunt but fairly decent instrument. I'm not going to read reviews of 10 movies, usually.

Personally, I most enjoy watching reviews after I've seen a movie anyway, to get a critic's take on the movie I enjoyed (or didn't).

Before it got killed by Amazon, one of the best things about LoveFilm was that it showed the distribution of user scores for each movie. For many movies the distribution was normal (peak in the middle) and those movies were usually "OK" ... but the interesting ones were the "marmite" movies with lots of 0s and 5s. Both sets would have the same average score, but you could gamble on the marmite ones and maybe get a great movie with a 3 average.

(I also try to avoid reviews before watching)

Yeah, it really depends on why you are evaluating these scores.

If it's simply to answer the question, "what will the wife and I watch tonight?" and you're presented with a algorithmically limited set of options based on your viewing habits and your up/down votes, yes, I think scores are a "good enough" blunt instrument.

If you want to explore the work of a particular director, genre, theme, period or actor but don't want to just watch all those films chronologically (or by only viewing "the blockbusters") then reading a bunch of reviews will help A LOT. The scores in that scenario would then merely be trite factoids.

If I am getting your point, you are basically positing that critics are inherently disconnected for different reasons and we should see them as some fringe freaks more than anything ?

PS: to put it out there, there’s people working at beer makers tasting beer samples every single day to check it is exactly the right taste. Ideally every day it has the same taste, if it differs they’ll do what’s needed to bring it back in line. That for decades in some companies. These people exist in spaces.

> If I am getting your point, you are basically positing that critics are inherently disconnected for different reasons and we should see them as some fringe freaks more than anything ?

They are writing for different audiences. That does not make them "freaks".

And their audience is more biased toward a.) those more deeply interested in movies b.) those seeking out of mainstream weirder things. People only casually interested in movies wont regularly read reviews. They read review once in a while if curious, but have no reason to read on regular. And people not seeking can find new movies by looking at local cinema program.

And also, if critics and mass were "connected" in the sense of "producing exact same score and commentary", there would be zero reason to pay critics. You would just go to aggregated mass score for that for free.

I agree with your take on platform where there is near 0 barrier to entry. Netflix for instance, or TV programming. Casual people will be less willing to go through reviews to device on a piece, and they'll also probably have had other customer reviews or view count guide them in their choice.

It is albeit different if to watch the movie you need to carve 3 hours of your time-off, go to a theater and pay 15€. Instead of randomly choosing a movie currently airing in your local theater, you might want to know if it's something you have any interest for (Imagine watching Edge Of Tomorrow thinking it will be some Star Trooper like spectacle). In that setting I think people expect critics adjust their assessment to the target public of the movie and give an accessible review of the piece. Which is super hard, but that's what they are expected to do.

I had both casual and "serious" periods. And in casual period I just check IMDB score, genre and few top mini-reviews there. That is it, I definitely wont read full length article to figure out whether I want to see the movie. Half casual movie watching experience is about social anyway, you go because friends go and selection of movie is less important.

In periods when I am more interested, I don't read what movie critics write to determine whether I will see the next action movie. I read that to learn more about movies, to find movies that are different or because reading it is fun.

My point here is that movie critics nowdays are not all that much serving the function of "make average person know whether they will like the movie". Average person has easier lower effort ways to find that.

Historically, aggregated mass scores weren’t really possible until social media, so one could argue that being a movie critic was something that had a pre-Twitter value that may have since changed.

Box-office receipts kind of correlate with this, but take a while to shake out, and sometimes what does and does not succeed at the box office is a matter of timing and chance.

> Why do people die from erotic self-asphyxiation? Because we have a compulsion to escalate and to push things further. We need novelty. We need new stuff. We go mad if it's just the same thing over and over. At least that's true for most of us. Not everyone takes it all that far, but when you invest a significant amount of time doing one thing in particular, you're always going to want to take it to greater heights.

> And that's the thing about critic reviews: they represent movie fans suffering from the cinematic equivalent of erotic self-asphyxiation. Old, tired cliches and predictable plots? No. They want something they haven't seen before. Art movies are incredibly weird, and film critics love them.

I think thismisunderstands art movies, film critics, and art in general (though there are exceptions). As someone who has learned to understand arts on very roughly that level, including film (an 'admission' that always gets a negative reaction!) it's not that you want more and different, like a hit of heroin, it's that your perception changes and you see things that you didn't see before. I first saw Richard III when I was in high school and let's say I didn't love it! I saw it more recently and it was mind-blowing; it soared to heights I didn't imagine, one after the other (though not a happy story way!). It was the same play - I wasn't getting something more or new - I just perceived so much more, from the language to the characters to the insights to the virtuoso writing. That change in perception is fundamental human perception and applies to anything in which we gain experience and expertise.

When you first drink wine, you cannot distinguish much between different bottles. You literally cannot taste all the flavors, see the colors, and perceive the other sensations that someone with more experience and expertise can. I'm sure you experience it with your profession or hobbies. If you sail boats, you perceive things that beginning sailors do not - and not meaningless things, but things that have a real impact. The same with reviewing code, UX, automobile engines, audio speaker sound, athletic performance, etc. etc. - whatever you have a developed perception of.

Human perception is far more than sensory input; what you 'see' is processed through your brain, including neurons that change based on usage and training, and also through your experience - you recognize your family on a perceptual level, for example (afaik).

The generic, quality critic sees things that you and I don't. I try to learn to see those things too, because when I do, they can be wonders. Just like wine tastes even better, car engines are far more moving, etc. when you develop that perception, so do the experiences of films, paintings, theater - I see colors (metaphorically, but literally sometimes) that I didn't earlier in life, so beautiful I didn't imagine they existed.

'Art films' sometimes cater to more developed perceptions and ignore others, which can make them seem wierd - there is (usually) something there to see, I promise (there are superficial genre art films, as with everything else). It's also true that you appreciate different innovations, such as a film that uses an old technique in an ingenius and powerful way, which you wouldn't notice if you didn't know about the technique, which is somewhat about finding something new, as you say.

The brain is a data compression engine and it's designed to ignore/"not enjoy" anything too repetitive and predictable.

You can get novelty from more extreme experiences and from complex experiences.

Franchise movies tend to go for more extremes (more characters, more CGI, more superficial complexity over an unchanging core), while art movies aim for complexity, implication, depth, and weirdness/unfamiliarity - to generate appealing unfamiliar cognitive load.

Critics are usually looking for the latter while typical franchise audiences (teens/twenties) are looking for the former.

So yes - there's going to be a disconnect. It's very hard to see a franchise movie through the eyes of a 15 year old when you're 60.

> The brain is a data compression engine and it's designed to ignore/"not enjoy" anything too repetitive and predictable.

I generally agree, but that is not at all the only way our brains enjoy or experience things. To imply otherwise is a vast oversimplification. Again, see my example above of seeing the same play - same thing, different experience.

And of course there’s an XKCD for it:

https://xkcd.com/915/

I don't want a critic to tell me what I SHOULD be watching. I rely on them to tell me what I will like. I can't watch every movie, the movie critic is meant to be a filter.

Historically movie critics judged a film based on its relative value. That's why you see a positive review on a cheesy rom-com and a negative review on a more ambitious flawed work of art. The rom-com review is viewed in the context of other rom-coms. For a positive review, it's saying "if you like rom-coms and their premise, this rom-com is good". I want it to be more prescriptive to what I will actually think when I watch the movie.

Most people use movie reviews to tell them whether they'll like a movie given its genre. That's why people say "I trust this person's reviews". They mean if the critic says the movie is worth watching and I decide to watch it, I will not be disappointed

But telling a person what they will like is a much more personalized endeavor suited for automated recommendation systems.

Any random person could like objectively bad movies.

But a critic can only recommend things objectively good. That means they can only try to filter out good movies, which are movies you should watch but may not like because your tastes are not objectively universal.

Critics are not qualified to tell me what I should watch towards developing my own character. The disconnect between what they push as best and what audiences like as good, illustrates the postmodern critic's lack of relevance. Critics are pushers of entitled cynicism and ideology, not meaningful content.

But critics should be experts in the field (of movies), and at the very least have seen it all. Therefore they can commentate on what's been done before and what is actually new.

> Critics are not qualified to tell me what I should watch towards developing my own character.

Well yes since everyone is different critics can never satisfy that for everyone.

Requiring to have seen it all is a big problem if you identify as a critic, in all senses of the words. It's easy to be pulled in by irrelevant novelty that is not meaningful to viewers, or become disenchanted and find your critical sensibilities turn against what viewers find meaningful. There's an ideological and philosophical component here that is at the rift between critics and viewers.

> suited for automated recommendation systems.

Realistically, current automated recommendation systems all sux.

I'm a film major. I wrote about film on print for quite a while. This was not in the US. I did want to prescribe, but not to the masses. To other crítics, to the pedantic purists that thought Bruce Lee was unimportant and Spielberg formulaic and uninspired, and that unless your name is David Lynch anything American is worse by default. People who thought anything with emotion was trash for the masses. And I was there, at the newspaper, saying *no*, romcoms can be of value, there's an artform to the action movie, the screwball comedy, and every genre film. I'm really proud of my time as a critic.

Nowadays I see everyone shitting on super heroes and remakes, they're easy targets to make people think that you're distinguished. Complain about sequels and reboots, and I say "Shakespeare is remade 100 times a year, a remake, reboot or whatever is always an artistic reconstruction that says a lot about its time, it's history, it's socioeconomic context. By studying the multiple versions of a story, we understand ourselves".

Many critics are just sad elitists because now they must share the cultural zeitgeist with everyone else, when even Roger Ebert, when you read his reviews, was historically a lot more open and fair than many of his admirers today.

That’s an interesting take on the remake I hadn’t considered before. But as someone without an artsy bone in my body, I wish something other than superhero movies could be made

Americans today are so sharply divided in what they consider to be acceptable beliefs and values that to create films with broad appeal, most filmmakers (and those who pay them) either (a) go out on a limb to promote their own values, or (b) resort to known-good tropes and remakes.

Perhaps no one wants to write a beautiful, thoughtful, non-politically charged screenplay anymore. Or maybe doing so would itself be seen as a political statement?

> I wish something other than superhero movies could be made

You can literally watch movies all day every day and never watch a super-hero. It was never so easy to watch exactly what you want, when you want, spending so little. I don't get this kind of insatisfaction nowadays. Maybe the hidden premise is that what bothers you is not a lack of content you enjoy, but the fact that so many people love so much a thing that you consider inferior and a abject. To put it bluntly: that's cultural elitism.

The vast majority of movies are still non-superhero movies.

You're right but it doesn't really feel that way (and I would think that as a percentage of spending, surely the superhero franchises have a fair fraction?)

It would be nice to see more new, original sci-fi and action. (but perhaps the other poster is on the money, and I am sure from a studio perspective it's easier to go with the tried and tested rather than out on a limb)

God I miss Ebert. It's not that I agreed with him always. It's that I knew where he stood, and I found his writing entertaining. As my familiarity of him grew over the years (decades!), I could accurately guess whether or not I would like a movie based on his review, whether he liked it or not. He's been hard to replace for me.

This has been my experience too. :(

Though now I mostly only go when I take the kids, I'm sure he'd hate most of the movies I see now now as much as I do.

I saw "Enter the Dragon" as a teen and liked it a lot. I rewatched it recently and had a hard time thinking of anything good about it :-/

I've turned into my dad. As a teen, I begged him to see a movie I thought was great. We went to see it, and on the way out I was like "well? what do you think?" He thought for a while, and came up with a rather lame compliment he'd obviously struggled to come up with.

Watching that movie today, I agreed with him.

I had the reverse experience, in a way: As a teen I though it was just fair. I thought the fight scenes - the reason we saw the film, of course - were gimmicky, repetitive, and unconvincing, and thought the same of other kung fu films. The rest of the movie was odd and boring. It was heretical and I kept that opinion to myself.

I saw it again in the last few years and while for me the rest of the movie was awful, the fight scenes were mesmerizing. Bruce Lee's physicality, the physical acting, is on a different planet than anything I've seen. Lee could have been a dancer or the original Andy Serkis - not that kung fu actor was a bad career move either.

Lee trained as a competitive ballroom dancer before he pivoted to martial arts. The two actually have a lot in common, though the purposes are quite different!

I agree that Lee's grace and style are fun to watch. It's also painfully obvious that he way outclassed his opponents in the movie, sort of like Fred Astaire dancing with a football player. I suspect that his ballroom training was the secret sauce that put his martial arts at an elegant level that the other martial arts practitioners couldn't match.

> It's also painfully obvious that he way outclassed his opponents in the movie, sort of like Fred Astaire dancing with a football player

Yes; the others occupied far too much of the screen time, which was very frustrating! It was like going to see Jimi Hendrix and hearing mostly bass and drum breaks. It's a vehicle for Lee; almost everything else in the movie sucks anyway; just find excuses to put Lee on the screen doing something!

But for me, I'd add to grace and style: The power of the emotion he could convey just through his body was incredible. I don't have a great appreciation for dance, but I've seen a couple best-in-the-world level dancers do something similar.

> Nowadays I see everyone shitting on super heroes

Who is doing that? IMHO the NY Times film reviewers, for example, overrate the superhero movies more than they do anything else.

> Many critics are just sad elitists because now they must share the cultural zeitgeist with everyone else

Who are you thinking of?

BTW, where did you do reviews?

I'm not always willing to dox myself, but I can say it was a big newspaper in South America.

I also made a comment, not an article or a study. I don't have any ready sources to present you, I merely expressed my opinion and you're free to take it as such.

A counter argument to your Shakespearean argument, movies are made once, recorded once, and can then be viewed anytime anywhere.

Whereas a play exists at one point in time and space. It has to be remade in every city and every year.

That doesn't make a lot of a difference, there will always be enough differences between two versions to make the effort worthwhile. 1916s Romeo and Juliet quite different from 1996's Baz Lhurman Romeo+Juliet.

1996

But how many films are essentially just Hamlet or The Taming of the Shrew?

Every remake is a piece of its own, even if they're based on the same story.

In my experience yes, critics were cringing over the "bad" movies you liked as a child. I don't think anything has changed, or that there is anything wrong with that.

Critics are paid to watch as many movies a possible, even ones they think they will hate (but obviously should keep an open mind). An average movie goer doesn't deliberately watch a movie they won't like, so there is already a disconnect.

With the internet amplifying fan culture critics are more likely to be seen as "wrong".

> Critic reviews are prescriptive: what they think the masses should watch.

This does not seem to be accurate description of movie reviews I have read. Like, not at all.

Part of a critic's job is to educate people. A good critic can explain why a certain film is groundbreaking and why another film is recycling ideas that have been done thousands of times. The critic's end-goal is to push the industry to make better films not because of critics, but because the public demands it.

This doesn't seem right at all, a critic's job is to drive page views and nothing more. What you are describing is how critic's like to perceive themselves.

That’s hardly the only model. If you find a critic that has similar tastes as you then you can just follow their recommendations. That’s a relatively new thing as newspaper reviews where focused on a much wider audience, but with the internet you have a lot more choices for reviewers.

Good critics aren't 'prescriptive'. They are scholars of various media who elucidate where a new piece of work sits with in an artist's oeuvre, or the larger canon that the work is contributing to.

While some self-anointed blogger critics might have certain ideas about what they wish an audience would watch, an actual critic's (broadsheet paper, industry trade) only job is to contextualise a work in the larger bodies of genre, medium, and culture.

> User reviews are retrospective: how much did they actually enjoy watching the movie.

How can ANY review not be 'retrospective'? In fact, probably the majority of film criticism speaks to how much or little the critic enjoyed a film. Pauline Kael (probably the most incisive and celebrated American critic in film history) built a legacy based pretty much on how much she much she enjoyed the film.

> I think a very interesting graph would be so see to what extent critics prescriptions are accurately forward-looking to viewer attitudes.

Why do critics and audiences have to have the same opinions? I this is the fundamental misunderstanding and wonky premise of the article.

> Critic reviews are prescriptive: what they think the masses should watch.

Who writes like that? Could you provide an example? I haven't seen it, having read many, many critics, including in sophisticated reviews like the New Yorker, Film Comment, and the NY Times.

Except users who don't watch the movie don't rate it. So they're self-selected. Critics are not.

It's worse than that, it's how much the fans of the movie enjoyed watching it. Most people who watch a movie don't go online and rate it.

> Critic reviews are prescriptive: what they think the masses should watch.

I think this really depends on the critics. Lots of critics never explicitly articulate a philosophy—or, if they do, I don't bother to seek it out—but, for one notable example, Roger Ebert explicitly subscribed to the philosophy that you should review a movie based on whether it achieves its goals, not on whether its goals are the same as your goals.

Ok, but he did also penalize films for having bad goals. Case in point The Human Caterpillar.

Centipede.

I... think I just won the prize of most useless nitpick ever.

hah, well just goes to show Ebert's 0 star review worked and I never watched it.

I miss Ebert. He never cheated and was clear as to which standard he was judging a movie by.

I rarely agreed with him. But I enjoyed his reviews. The best part of his show was when he'd bicker with Siskel.

Companies like Netflix know what and how users watch. This could also be used as data for reviews.

60% of the viewers loose interest after episode 3, 40% of the viewers skip through the fight scene, 80% of the viewers watch the movie in one go...

It's a pitty Netflix knows this but still recommend movies I already watched or don't like.

So the question is: on whose behalf are reviews written?