[crispyambulance]

> 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.

[edanm]

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).

[r_c_a_d]

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)

[crispyambulance]

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.