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Where do you find movie reviews?
I usually use Rotten Tomatoes to find new movies to watch (typically streaming, these days) but they've gotten increasingly annoying. What do you use and why?
I usually use Rotten Tomatoes to find new movies to watch (typically streaming, these days) but they've gotten increasingly annoying. What do you use and why?
Depending on the reason why you think RT is annoying, I use Metacritic.
You’re probably familiar with it as being a video game thing but it’s a better movie score aggregator than RT. The metascore is an average, instead of the binary percentage of RT. And it’s a weighted average, meaning that reviews from more “important” publications like The New York Times and The LA Times are given more weight than publications like IGN.
Instead of certifying specific critics, MC only certifies publications. And while critics themselves upload their RT score for a movie, MC assigns the points to reviews themselves.
I prefer to RT nowadays primarily because RT lowered the qualifications of what it means to be a certified critic. So we get a lot of random blogs with titles like “Mike Goes To The Movies” and whatnot. And the Metascore reflects how a movie was received at the time (as the score does not change after all publications are considered).
So it’s kind of a filtered version of RT. One where high quality reviews are front and center.
Well, I'm annoyed by the ads. But there is also the commonly-used UI where the way they list movies is via a grid of images of movie boxes, sort of like at a video store. But choosing movies by looking at the marketing picture on the cover of the box is pretty dumb, considering that we don't even have the boxes anymore. A reasonable search results page should also include a plot summary so I don't have to look at each one, one by one.
I've found that Rotten Tomatoes has pretty good scores for me, but it's the rest of the UI I don't like.
between Letterboxd, Metacritic, and a combination of /r/movies and /r/truefilm, you're probably set. Letterboxd is the best if you aren't only looking for new movies.
If you're looking for actual reviewers, check this list for the new stuff. For old stuff, you can't go wrong with Ebert and Pauline Kael.
late edit: I also check mubi.com a lot for movies.
Showing my age, but IMDB is my goto. It's not ideal, but no website is ideal. I use IMDB because:
Really not true, unfortunately. IMDB is pretty bad for foreign indie films, foreign shows, web shows, and small studio animes. Letterboxd is actually much much much more comprehensive, in my experience.
I was not aware of that, that is good to know.
However, I do believe IMDB has the largest catalog as a whole. I personally don't remember ever looking for something and not finding it on IMDB.
But I'm not an expert or anything, that is just my subjective impression.
That may have been true 5-6 years ago, but I don't think that's true anymore. Even Trakt seems to have a far more comprehensive database than IMDB these days, both of which have less than Letterboxd... which I know because I have run into plenty that isn't on IMDB, but is sometimes on Trakt, and yet almost always on Letterboxd (no matter how obscure).
E.g. That's the reason all my links (but one) in this comment are from Letterboxd, not IMDB. ;)
That makes sense because I don't watch a lot of new movies, so I wouldn't know the difference because the movies IMDB doesn't have are less than 6 years old.
But that does warrant some investigation. I'll look into it.
I usually check Cherry Picks: https://www.thecherrypicks.com/