It’s obvious that the big review aggregate sites believe in what they do. The service they offer is not one of detailed assessment of individuals’ responses to movies, although they provide readers with access to this service by linking to all their reviews. Their mission, though, seems to be to identify or at least try to locate areas in which a vast scope of notable voices tend to agree. In my experience, critics are really, really good at recognizing things that work in movies, and things that don’t work so well. They are less good at explaining why this is, because that is something that is naturally harder to do. Much harder. Almost impossible at the best of times. Being able to explain why something works, or at least being able to talk about it whether you actually make reasonable sense or not, does not necessitate being able to recognize greatness when you see it. Malcolm Gladwell could attest to this perhaps. Critics, as a group, are incredibly adept at these snap judgments, and these are reasonably well reflected in statistical form.
That’s not to say there’s only one way to represent this, though. So we have a site like Metacritic that pays more attention to certain writers who are considered, by a kind of popular opinion even though this specific opinion was probably not determined statistically nor represented numerically, to be the best in their field. And they’re constantly checking and re-checking to ensure they are properly analyzing who these folks are, and adjusting their system accordingly. Then there’s Rotten Tomatoes, which features one big number that compiles essentially yes or no responses from reviewers and provides that tally, but also highlights certain “Top Critics” and displays an average rating to give a sense of enthusiasm and expert opinion on the movies. This is one area where they’ve become more than just a simple thumbs up or down collection. More recently there has been Criticwire, Indiewire’s review aggregator that applies a letter grade to reviews and works with critics to establish an even more accurate crowdsourced perspective on movies.
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