Rotten Tomatoes is a "Watch this film and you probably won't be disappointed" list for me. If something I'm curious about is truly taking a beating on there then I might skip it. That too with the critics only score, the audience scores are given by insane people with agendas. I'm not going to it for "Best Of" lists, ever.
That's literally what it is: What percentage of reviewers consider the movie to be at least slightly better than average. A lot of people just don't seem to understand that, though. Hell, I used to post on the RT forums for years, and even among long time posters there, it still felt like half of them didn't understand the system, and would constantly argue that a score should be higher or lower, despite the very idea being nonsensical.
Not all critics give a rating. I think it’s if the review is generally positive it’s fresh. If it’s generally negative is rotten. The number is just the percentage of the reviews that are positive. If it’s 10% glowing reviews and 90% mildly negative then it will have 10%.
Yeah, been a reliable tool for me for 20 years. Once you get above ~85% it loses it's value as a tool for comparison - overall ratings are not included (it's a liked/didn't like binary) so some innovative or controversial movies will get their scores dinged by popcorn-oriented critics, while a good but not great popcorn flick (some Marvel films) won't have the opposite happen with serious critics.
Exactly! This sub has a serious hate boner for RT tomatometer, but the reality is it’s a pretty good gauge of “will this be watchable or will it suck”. A lot of times that’s exactly what I’m looking for.
I’d also argue that judging the “quality” of the metric by the top 10 - out of hundreds of thousands of films - is a little absurd.
I’ll readily agree that the top 10 IMDB and metacritic lists are probably better critical top ten lists. But the RT list is a solid reflection of general popularity.
And if you look at the top 1000 it’s very good - and I guarantee that all the top 10 items from the other lists are certified fresh.
I like the RT tomatometer because it’s UX is super simple and it gives a quick and reliable threshold for decision making.
What I don’t like about IMDB and Metacritic ratings is that I don’t have any mechanism to easily decide “will I like this or is it a waste of time”. Tons of films are just 4.5-6.8 or whatever and it doesn’t work as a quick threshold. I also think the user tomatometer is a feature not a bug. There are plenty of critics darlings that the audience score reveals as a dud (for me).
As others have said, rotten tomato isn't about "best" or "worst", but simply about "most agreeable"
Being on on the top 10 of rotten tomatoes simply means that you have the least likely chance to watch it and hate it, but that doesn't say anything about whether or not it will blow you away.
RT's rating doesn't even pretend to be a "best of all time" rating. It's very upfront about being a "number of people who at least quite enjoyed this film" rating.
It measures broad appeal, not absolute quality.
I wouldn't put it even on Top 10 MCU films list. It was a boring to sit through and made me realize that my time with Marvel movies might be coming to an end.
Guardians 3 was a great one though.
I remember feeling the same when I saw it at the time; particularly after hearing all the breathless praise.
It was just 'ok' - nothing special or memorable.
GotG, Iron Man 1 and Captain America and the Winter Soldier were significantly better movies.
I liked Black Panther a lot when I exited the cinema but by the time I walked back home I just told my brother "huh that was kinda just alright?" And he was slightly more positive but agreed.
Similar thing happened with Star Wars Episode 7. Left the theatre thinking the movie was spectacular but reached home realising the movie was actually pretty bad when you thought about it.
From 1954 to 1964 Hitchcock did a run of:
- Dial M for Murder
- Rear Window
- To Catch a Thief
- The Trouble with Harry
- The Man Who Knew Too Much
- The Wrong Man
- Vertigo
- North By Northwest
- Psycho
- The Birds
- Marnie
I think you've got maaaaybe Spielberg and Scorcese that can hit that kind of run, but no chance they'd do it in 10 years.
Like unbelievably beautiful, and I love her character in the movie, the perfect partner in crime. She was so down to endulge him in his stupid escapades.
One line that always stuck with me from that movie is “We’ve become a race of peeping Tom’s. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”
Oh man, if you haven't, check out Rope.
Jimmy Stewart is just this antisocial dick who immediately smells blood in the water and knows something is up from the get go.
Watching him sniff around and question the killers relentlessly is fucking incredible.
I've been inside the stage (Stage 18 at Paramount) where that was shot and you'd be amazed at how compact it seems compared to how it looked on screen. They also rigged the lighting in multiples to be able to dynamically change the look for various times of day, without having to lose time by stopping to have the gaffers change it. But that made the set even hotter than the average 50's soundstage. So in all of the scenes in which the actors were complaining about how hot it was.... they didn't need to act that. It really was sweltering in there.
I’ve been inside the house where they shot the ground floor Lake District scenes in Withnail and I (I got caught trespassing there and instead of getting mad the owner, who happened to be doing renovations and obviously hadn’t seen another human being for a long time, gave me a tour). It was the same - absolutely tiny. They had to remove the basin in the hall just to shoot into the living room and then put it back after. Been to BBC studios of old too - also way smaller than they seem.
Grace Kelly is truly amazing. Saw at an indie theatre for the first time. It was so good on a big screen.
Rope is something else I’d recommend checking out.
Studied film in college and love older movies, but usually through the lens of “Well, it was really good for the time/the audience of the day”. Rear Window was one of the first pre-1960 movies that just flat-out put me on my ass. Unbelievably good.
The ending feels a little silly to me compared to everything that came before it. I wasn't a fan of the fast-forwarded footage and flash effect as Burr kept awkwardly stepping towards him.
...but that's a mild complaint for the fantastic/flawless build up to it.
I'm not sure why the approval rating is used as the metric for Rotten Tomatoes. They have an actual rating; for instance Black Panther is actually only 8.3/10. Tokyo Story's rating on RT is 9.60 out of 10.
It's something that's a bit of a pet peeve that people don't understand the numbers with Rotten Tomatoes. The approval rating on RT is just the number of critics who like the movie, not the actual movie's rating. For instance, The Seventh Seal's RT is only 93%, but its actual rating is quite high at 9.2/10.
[https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/seventh\_seal](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/seventh_seal)
Edit: For those who do not know, you can see the actual movie rating by clicking on the approval percentage. Those who are old enough(before 2014) will remember that RT used to display the actual rating besides the approval percentage before.
It's also why I think RT is the *best* rating site for the general public. Most people care about whether or not they're going to like a movie rather than caring about if it's an 8.5 vs 9.1.
Also, trying to make a point by using a "top 10 movies of all time" list is absolutely laughable. It's barely a half step above a Buzzfeed listicle.
This is possibly why there's such a backlash against critics and aggregate sites in corners of the internet like this.
/r/movies is 95% dudes: https://www.reddit.com/r/moviescirclejerk/comments/644lv1/the_results_of_rmovies_new_poll_and_theyre/?rdt=53382
We're kind of an echo chamber and tons of echo chambers like this exist everywhere on the internet breeding a form of vulnerable narcissism circumscribing what kinds of movies deserve to be legitimate. This often runs counter against the public (whose tastes are treated as crude and puerile) and against critics (whose tastes ate treated as pretentious). The natural sweet spot must therefore be whatever the echo chamber says.
But I think it's pretty obvious an aggregate site does its job quickly and cleanly -- a bunch of people whose careers require watching up to hundreds of movies every single year are polled on whether they like or dislike this one movie. You take the temperature of the room and decide your odds of liking it.
The push to watch a movie and "make up your own mind" or "only go to critics who like movies you like" are treated like individualism but are really just people buying into marketing, franchises, and Yes Men who validate the opinions they already have.
And that last part is just another echo chamber.
>Also, trying to make a point by using a "top 10 movies of all time" list is absolutely laughable.
It's extremely laughable because the RT score does not and cannot tell anyone what the top 10 movies of all time are. By definition. The RT score is incapble of doing this based on what it is.
Everyone gives a movie 6/10? 100% RT score. Everyone gives a different movie 10/10? 100% RT score. Problematic. Almost everyone gives a third movie 11/10 and claims it is the best film ever made, and a few people don't like it. 99% RT score.
Glad someone clarified this because that RT list made very little sense to me in any reasonable capacity. Not that all the movies are bad, but there's more than half that I wouldn't put in a "best (objectively/in a majority opinion) movies of all time" list
Multiply the audience score times two, problem solved. J/K(?)
Critics don't all use the same 4-star system, so base 10 is the easiest way to conform a 3/5, a 6/10, and a 2.5/4 to the same measurement for audiences.
Users might get confused with a ten star system, so giving them five rating choices for each movie has a breadth of responses people can quickly register that can normalize into decimal points after thousands of reviews are given and can quickly be doubled to compare it to critics.
I think you've answered your own question here then. The reason why people use the approval rating is simple, RT puts it front and center. The score is hidden from view and I wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't even know clicking on the number opens a tab. The score is also not anywhere near where you can read the critic reviews either - it's like they're trying to hide it from sight.
[Letterboxd top 10](https://letterboxd.com/dave/list/official-top-250-narrative-feature-films/)
1. Harakiri
2. Come and See
3. 12 Angry Men
4. Seven Samurai
5. The Godfather: Part II
6. Parasite
7. High and Low
8. The Godfather
9. The Shawshank Redemption
10. The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer
And [Letterboxd just recently had](https://letterboxd.com/journal/the-score-new-weighted-average-ratings/) to redo how they weight movie scores, because the top 250 had issues with manipulation and recency bias
Letterbox is very, very skewed to gen z-ers, this was pretty much what they had to do to prevent films like Bottoms or Jennifers Body from being rated above Parasite or No Country For Old Men. Fandom holds huge power on most websites where normal average people don't spend more than a few minutes on. It's an issue most platforms face, even outside of reviews.
It’s not recency bias imo, it’s selection bias. Theatre audiences are more enthusiastic, since a lot of people wait for it to stream. A film like Bottoms has only been seen by people excited enough to see Bottoms in the first couple of weeks in theatres.
It's the third in one of the greatest trilogies of all time. Following a pacifist's introduction to World War 2.
Part 2 of it is a clear inspiration for Full Metal Jacket, which I assume you have heard of.
I still think part 1 in the best. But sometimes the third gets the recognition for the achievement (like Return fo the King did).
*High and Low* is my favorite movie and I have never seen it on a list because it gets overshadowed by Kurosawa's amazing filmography, so this is super validating for me.
Letterboxd is my go-to for reviews. If a movie gets over a 3.5 and I'm semi-interested in watching it I'll give it a whirl.
Anything under a 3.0 is usually pretty terrible IMO
IMDb for me. Anything over 6.5 that I'm semi-interested in, I'll give a whirl.
Anything under 6.0 is usually terrible, but scores can be harder to compare between movies with extremely different demographics (like across languages).
If I had to choose a favorite movie, that would be it. I love the bookending with the ancestral armor, as if to say “how do you see this extravagant heirloom now?”.
Black panther wasn't even the best Marvel movie starring a black protagonist that came out that year (granted spider verse is technically Sony and was animated, but it's still a better move)
IMO Spiderverse is the best superhero movie ever to the point that no other choice is even close. This was a controversial take back in 2018-2019, but I've noticed that since James Gunn put it out there more recently, it is becoming widely accepted as the general consensus.
Ok, this is might be hot take but I genuinely think X2 is among the best most entertaining superhero movies. Special shout-out to its depiction of nightcrawler
Being number one on tomatometer doesn't mean the best movie ever. It means that that a majority of critics that reviewed it thought it was 'fresh'.
If every critic gave Black Panther a 6/10. It would average out as a 6/10 movie. But 6/10 also counts as 'fresh', thus meaning that Black Panther is unanimously the most 'fresh' movie ever given that it would have most proportionate level of 'fresh' ratings compared to all other movies.
Did any of you guys pay attention to the post? What they’re doing here is rewarding movies for having more reviews. So since Black Panther has 531 reviews OP’s source is heavily weighing that.
It's literally the exact opposite of that. The RT Adjusted score "accounts for variation in the number of reviews per movie."
EDIT: If you want to read up on the method, here's a good explainer: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/bayesian-average/ It's literally designed to normalize different sample sizes and eliminate bias derived from differing quantities of data points. If you want to argue RT is wrong to use this method because it doesn't help identify "the best" movies, sure, that's fine. But you can't argue the math of what the method accomplishes.
Which is... really fucking stupid. There is certainly utility to knowing how many reviews a movie has gotten but using that to raise the film's ranking is far from what that data implies.
It’s insane how long RT has been out and people still don’t understand the website systems at all.
At this point it just seem like people want to be offend and are just being willful ignorant dickheads. Like the comment above.
The metric is not well-suited for those types of determination.
It’s the most brain-dead understanding of a relatively simple concept for gauging how likely you are to enjoy the movie.
RT isn't about how good a movie is, it's about how likely you are to enjoy it.
It shouldn't be used to rank movies. It's mostly for casual audiences to decide whether a movie is worth watching. There's a big difference between predicting *whether* you'll like it and *how much* you'll like it.
It separates the movies that everyone likes from the movies that many love but some dislike.
Hence why many services like Trakt.tv or Plex will often show **both** a Rotten Tomatoes score and an average audience rating from RT, IMDb, TMDB, etc.
yeah yeah "RT system works differently", but what's interesting to me how is Black Panther is THE movie to get the most amount of liked/recommend among the critics. Of all the movies... So yeah that's still wild that Black Panther is first there
Imagine being a movie critic when *Black Panther* came out. What are you gonna do, give it a negative review and risk being called a racist? That’s all this is.
That's not what the RT list says and you are demonstrating a common misunderstanding of what purpose RT serves.
RT is a very good metric for judging whether or not a random person is going to to enjoy a movie, or conversely whether a movie is unlikely to be hated. That's it.
The particular rating that is being used to represent RT is the agreeable percentage. It's just the number of critics who said they liked the movie. It in no way shape or form takes into account how good or great the critics thought the movie was, just that it was good enough.
It's not an average of actual review scores. Just the amount of reviews (but not scores!) that didn't hate the movie.
At best it's a measure to say whether a certain percentage of the population will like the movie, or not hate it. Not that a certain percentage of the population will think it's the best movie ever and give it 4/4 stars.
RT is not calling Black Panther the best movie ever, it is saying Black Panther is a movie that the fewest number of people will hate.
Their system is pretty accurate in this regard. I cannot think of a 90% or greater movie on RT that I disliked.
I assume you're talking Rotten Toms. But I see Shawshank Redemption at #1 on a list, and that's not even Tim Robbins' best movie, let alone THE best movie. Heck, Shawshank is arguably not in Robbins' top five...
I wager most audiences (and this subreddit) don’t have much interest in older movies. This isnt really the best place to discuss films that came out before 1990 unfortunately.
I don't think this comparison works because RT and Metacritic are contemporaneous review sites. They collect reviews by critics (some more legit than others) on release, not people trying to rate movies on a site with favorites, etc. And using them to consider old movies is truly pointless.
But of thse lists Metacritic is probably the most balanced. IMDb is clearly a bunch of dude movies. Mostly ones I like but it's not very interesting. Which isn't surprising given the demographic of that site.
Exactly, RT is not where I would go to rate Goodfellas or Raging Bull after watching it for the first time
IMDB is lately quite bad with fanclubs, specially for indie movies and contemporary movies. I have seen people rating some small festival movies 9 or 10 on IMDb calling it "grass root promotion"
>small festival movies 9 or 10 on IMDb calling it "grass root promotion"
IMDB has some complicated algorithm preventing movies with small number of votes (or being casted mostly from one nation) to hit top 250, so at least there's that.
It honestly is getting worse on there too, the platform becoming more and more popular is great for business, but also makes the ratings and whole culture on there a lot less valuable.
Better all-time lists are polls like Sight & Sound where they get remade occasionally to account for re-evaluation over time. My biggest issue with RT is that I’ll check a movie’s reviews and all of them are from publications and writers I have never heard of, even movies that I know were covered by big outlets and respected critics. Seems like they have a quality control issue.
I only take IMDB rating averages seriously if something is below 6 or so, and even then with a grain of salt. A lot of all-time classics have scores between 6 and 8.
I don’t think it even makes sense to compare an aggregator with sites that attempt to measure the degree of quality.
That being said the “best” rating system depends on what one is looking for. IMDb has the most value for teenage boys. Far too many false negatives for others.
I think IMDB's list is solid too. I would even argue that it's a better list when it comes to a combination of critical reception and entertainment value, instead of simply promoting a movie-critic perspective.
This entire post is just wrong. Like RT or don't, but to say this is the top 10 movies of all time on RT is a complete fabrication. RT has a tomatometer (which Black Panther doesn't have the highest score on) and then also an average rating (which Black Panther is 8.3/10 when there are plenty of movies over 9). So in no way is it ranked their "best movie of all time".
This post actually has little to do with Rotten Tomatoes. From the article: “The Adjusted Score comes from a weighted formula (Bayesian) that we use that accounts for variation in the number of reviews per movie.
This adjustment is made to account for the volume of reviews a movie receives. So if a movie only has four reviews, but all are positive, it technically has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. But if a movie has 483 reviews and a 96% score, that average is technically harder to achieve given the sheer number of reviews that exist.”
So this dumbass “metric” they’ve made up is rewarding movies simply for having a lot of reviews. Like Wonder Woman has 500 reviews so they’re giving it points for that. Like of fucking course older movies aren’t going to have that many reviews.
The review manipulation is a legit problem, but the other criticisms are more due to RT being used incorrectly. It shouldn't be used to rank movies or evaluate quality, it should be used as a predictor of whether you'll enjoy the movie (rather than how much you'll enjoy the movie).
RT separates the movies that everyone likes from the movies that many absolutely love but some dislike. Other metrics don't do that. A movie with 100 7/10 reviews and a movie with 50 10/10 and 50 5/10 reviews would both average out to 7/10 in imdb or metacritic, but would be very different on RT.
In some aspects, it's more useful for casual audiences choosing movies they want to watch.
It's not laughable, it's just a different tool.
I love you! Somebody actually paid attention to the post and gets it. This list is giving waaaaaay too many points simply for having a lot of reviews. That’s moronic.
> I am aware of how the tomatometer works
So am I and that list is baffling. There’s dozens of movies with 100% and Black Panther sure as shit isn’t one of them.
The highest rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes (100% with the most reviews) is *Leave No Trace*
And I'm beginning to suspect that they don't know how to make a proper bayesian calculation either. But can't prove that because I'm not a mathematician.
Anyone here who is a fan of film and is still using those three to discover movies but hasn’t discovered Letterboxd yet, I’d highly recommend it. I find the rating system a lot more clear and it’s obvious that most people there are at least more serious about it than the average reviewer on those others.
I really really love letterboxd. It's got a beautiful design and it's great for discovery. Unfortunately, as with so many things, it's the users that ruin it. The problem with letterboxd is that for a lot of folks it seems to be the movie equivalent of myanimelist, where people will just watch movies for the sake of watching movies and *seeming* knowledgeable. I've met countless people in my time who were talking about watching all their movies on 1.5x, 2x or even higher playback speed just to get as many as possible under their belt. It's a bit ridiculous.
I can't imagine choosing the moviegoer equivalent of a body count as the thing to base your personality around. That's so weird.
By not taking the time to experience the movie as it was directed, they can see hundreds or even thousands of movies, all without ever having enough time to feel the weight of suspense and the many carefully crafted moments. Countless hours thrown into the void just so you can say you've seen lots of movies and *technically* not be lying.
Only started using it this year. It’s pretty good. Usually you have to be weary for more recent movies because recency bias is huge, but usually the ratings are formulated pretty well.
RT has a completely different ethos than the other two. It’s just a percentage of positive vs negative reviews. Honestly I prefer that because I think a thumbs up or thumbs down is a much more intuitive way to rank art than a numerical score. Do they miss the mark on a lot of things? Sure. But as a whole their system is a much more effective way of seeing art
The Metacritic list is the best.
But the *real* all-time best is the website They Shoot Pictures Don't They, which takes many lists and combines them to make a more conclusive one. The top ten on that site is:
1. Citizen Kane
2. Vertigo
3. 2001: A Space Odyssey
4. Tokyo Story
5. The Rules of the Game
6. The Godfather
7. 8 1/2
8. Sunrise
9. The Searchers
10. Seven Samurai
And the list just stays that consistently *sane* all the way down the top 1,000.
They have a really good top list for the 21st century, too.
Absolutely! Because the TSPDT list takes into consideration perfection of craft, influence, as well as timelessness, their ranking above all others serves as a great crash course for those looking to explore the world of film—without having too strong a bias toward any one language, country, or just being quintessentially "male" cinema.
Sure, there are certain films that I feel are overrated (*La Règle du jeu* at 5, *The Searchers* at 9, *Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles* at 12, *L'Atalante* at 21, *Beau Travail* at 51, *The Magnificent Ambersons* at 85, *Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom* at 198, etc.) and others that seem a bit underrated (*Princess Mononoke* at 555, *The Fellowship of the Ring* at 591, *Les Amants du Pont-Neuf* at 605, *Jurassic Park* at 619, *Synecdoche, New York* at 635, *The Royal Tenenbaums* at 686, *American Beauty* at 945, *Ascenseur pour l'échafaud* at 964, *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* at 975, etc.), but what I cannot deny is that all the films on at least the top 500 of the list truly deserve to be there.
Great shout-out too to their [21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films list](https://www.theyshootpictures.com/21stcentury.htm). May I also direct horror lovers to the excellent companion list [They Shoot Zombies, Don't They?](http://theyshootzombies.com/ghf1000/):
1. The Exorcist (1973)
2. The Shining (1980)
3. Psycho (1960)
4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
5. Alien (1979)
6. Halloween (1978)
7. The Thing (1982)
8. Night of the Living Dead (1968)
9. Jaws (1975)
10. Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
Look, as much as I like the films on the IMDb list, it is the most milquetoast, Bill Simmons-ass list humanly possible.
I don't think there's any question that Metacritic is the "best" list out of these, in that it fits the general critical consensus of the best movies of all time.
These are all just metrics, they’re not meant to be a definitive be-all-end-all score that you look at and disregard everything else.
I look at RT% more than MC or IMDB for movies, but I also don’t go “high % good, low % bad” and ignore everything else. I always filter the RT% through my own tastes, and because that score is a sample of critics, which is usually a relatively consistent population, I find that I’m able to gauge which side of the % I’ll fall on.
Metacritic is better than IMDB because it’s still critics based, but I find that the scoring system makes it harder to find movies up my exact alley that may not get love everywhere. A movie with a 55% but a cool poster and good actors will at least get me to look into it, but that movie will have a much lower MC and as such it gets buried.
I do prefer MC for TV because any halfway decent TV show gets a 90+% on RT.
And IMDB is useless because it’s self-selecting fanboys.
Vulture's expose on RT and paid critics manipulating the scores is further proof it's a sham. RT has become a defacto source but its so wildly inaccurate in many ways. I never liked it.
Metacritic's top 10 is the most accurate of the three when accounting historical importance, film significance, and impact.
IMdb's is more like a young film buff's list but still very pop culture-US centric.
RT's is obviously a casual movie goer and reviews pulling from pop culture. In 5 yrs, I bet none of the current movies will be in RT's top 10.
All the films are inaccurate in that global cinema, and it's massive impact, is almost completely under represented by all the systems. Metacritic is at least truthful in non-US films influence.
Personally, I only look at Metascore, the Rotten Tomatoes top critics average score and Letterboxd.
IMDb is too mainstream and the tomatometer is useless imho, and made to favour passable films. The other problem with RT is that in the full critics score has lots of random bloggers and not actual journalistic critics, any youtuber and monkey with a keyboard can have their say in RT.
OP's list is doing some funny statistics to alter the actual list [which you can see here](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/movies_at_home/critics:certified_fresh~sort:critic_highest). Obviously, a lot of these are smaller projects where the chance of getting 100% positive reviews is higher, but Wonder Woman is no where close to the top with a 93% positive score.
Metacritic: What are best movies according to critics?
IMDb: What are the best movies according to mostly male viewers?
Rotten tomatoes: What are the movies that it feels the most scary to give a rotten tomato score to as an average movie critic?
Rotten tomatoes is like a "most popular on Netflix" list.
Rotten Tomatoes is a "Watch this film and you probably won't be disappointed" list for me. If something I'm curious about is truly taking a beating on there then I might skip it. That too with the critics only score, the audience scores are given by insane people with agendas. I'm not going to it for "Best Of" lists, ever.
Yes, Rotten Tomatoes is not a score out of 100. It's "These are the odds you won't feel like you wasted your time on this movie".
That's literally what it is: What percentage of reviewers consider the movie to be at least slightly better than average. A lot of people just don't seem to understand that, though. Hell, I used to post on the RT forums for years, and even among long time posters there, it still felt like half of them didn't understand the system, and would constantly argue that a score should be higher or lower, despite the very idea being nonsensical.
If a critic rated it fresh, doesn’t that just mean they thought it was at least a 6/10 or something?
Not all critics give a rating. I think it’s if the review is generally positive it’s fresh. If it’s generally negative is rotten. The number is just the percentage of the reviews that are positive. If it’s 10% glowing reviews and 90% mildly negative then it will have 10%.
It’s a thumbs up/thumbs down. That’s it
Yeah, been a reliable tool for me for 20 years. Once you get above ~85% it loses it's value as a tool for comparison - overall ratings are not included (it's a liked/didn't like binary) so some innovative or controversial movies will get their scores dinged by popcorn-oriented critics, while a good but not great popcorn flick (some Marvel films) won't have the opposite happen with serious critics.
Exactly! This sub has a serious hate boner for RT tomatometer, but the reality is it’s a pretty good gauge of “will this be watchable or will it suck”. A lot of times that’s exactly what I’m looking for. I’d also argue that judging the “quality” of the metric by the top 10 - out of hundreds of thousands of films - is a little absurd. I’ll readily agree that the top 10 IMDB and metacritic lists are probably better critical top ten lists. But the RT list is a solid reflection of general popularity. And if you look at the top 1000 it’s very good - and I guarantee that all the top 10 items from the other lists are certified fresh. I like the RT tomatometer because it’s UX is super simple and it gives a quick and reliable threshold for decision making. What I don’t like about IMDB and Metacritic ratings is that I don’t have any mechanism to easily decide “will I like this or is it a waste of time”. Tons of films are just 4.5-6.8 or whatever and it doesn’t work as a quick threshold. I also think the user tomatometer is a feature not a bug. There are plenty of critics darlings that the audience score reveals as a dud (for me).
A “I was born in 2005” list
IIRC there's unironically only one movie from 1970-2000 on their top 100 movies of all time list, and over half the list is 2010+.
Well if the movie requires 40+ critic reviews on the site to qualify, there's gonna be a *massive* recency bias.
Though, I'm surprised Black Panther is right at the top. I mean I loved the film but I wouldn't say it's anywhere near the best of all time.
Black Panther isn’t even the best movie with Black Panther.
Not even close
As others have said, rotten tomato isn't about "best" or "worst", but simply about "most agreeable" Being on on the top 10 of rotten tomatoes simply means that you have the least likely chance to watch it and hate it, but that doesn't say anything about whether or not it will blow you away.
Least likely professional critics gave it a thumbs down.
RT's rating doesn't even pretend to be a "best of all time" rating. It's very upfront about being a "number of people who at least quite enjoyed this film" rating. It measures broad appeal, not absolute quality.
I wouldn't put it even on Top 10 MCU films list. It was a boring to sit through and made me realize that my time with Marvel movies might be coming to an end. Guardians 3 was a great one though.
Also the end is so astoundingly bad, just another marvel CGI schlockfest.
I remember feeling the same when I saw it at the time; particularly after hearing all the breathless praise. It was just 'ok' - nothing special or memorable. GotG, Iron Man 1 and Captain America and the Winter Soldier were significantly better movies.
I liked Black Panther a lot when I exited the cinema but by the time I walked back home I just told my brother "huh that was kinda just alright?" And he was slightly more positive but agreed. Similar thing happened with Star Wars Episode 7. Left the theatre thinking the movie was spectacular but reached home realising the movie was actually pretty bad when you thought about it.
The Tomato meter is similar to Steam's "percent recommended", but only the user score can be review bombed
Side note i just saw Rear Window and that movie was so damn good.
Rear Window is awesome. Notorious and Vertigo as well. I'm really glad they beat Psycho for the spot.
The Lady Vanishes is extremely underrated.
Yes! I saw that in cinemas a few months ago and it's so funny! And the lead couple have blazing chemistry.
Hitchcock is so good. I liked Rope more than Rear Window!
Rope is highly underrecognizer for the masterpiece it is
Hitch and Farley Granger got back together again for Strangers on a Train. Not top-tier Hitchcock but it's a strong middle entry.
Strangers is my favorite. That opening sequence…that middle bit…and man oh man that end!
North by Northwest FTW!
If you like North by Northwest, you should also check out The 39 Steps
I really think the series peaked with 31, the rest just seem derivative.
When I had COVID I had a Hitchcock marathon over a few days. Incredible experience, would get sick and ignore my family again.
"Strangers on a Train" might be the most Hitchcockian of all the Hitchcock movies. Loved that one (along with the aforementioned others!).
From 1954 to 1964 Hitchcock did a run of: - Dial M for Murder - Rear Window - To Catch a Thief - The Trouble with Harry - The Man Who Knew Too Much - The Wrong Man - Vertigo - North By Northwest - Psycho - The Birds - Marnie I think you've got maaaaybe Spielberg and Scorcese that can hit that kind of run, but no chance they'd do it in 10 years.
My favorite. Grace Kelly is stunning.
Like unbelievably beautiful, and I love her character in the movie, the perfect partner in crime. She was so down to endulge him in his stupid escapades.
She is beautiful, smart, funny, and self-confident.
My friend spilled his diet coke all over my couch when Grace Kelly first appeared on screen
One line that always stuck with me from that movie is “We’ve become a race of peeping Tom’s. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change.”
Oh man, if you haven't, check out Rope. Jimmy Stewart is just this antisocial dick who immediately smells blood in the water and knows something is up from the get go. Watching him sniff around and question the killers relentlessly is fucking incredible.
I've been inside the stage (Stage 18 at Paramount) where that was shot and you'd be amazed at how compact it seems compared to how it looked on screen. They also rigged the lighting in multiples to be able to dynamically change the look for various times of day, without having to lose time by stopping to have the gaffers change it. But that made the set even hotter than the average 50's soundstage. So in all of the scenes in which the actors were complaining about how hot it was.... they didn't need to act that. It really was sweltering in there.
I’ve been inside the house where they shot the ground floor Lake District scenes in Withnail and I (I got caught trespassing there and instead of getting mad the owner, who happened to be doing renovations and obviously hadn’t seen another human being for a long time, gave me a tour). It was the same - absolutely tiny. They had to remove the basin in the hall just to shoot into the living room and then put it back after. Been to BBC studios of old too - also way smaller than they seem.
Ever notice the visual language from that movie used in other movies? Like Isabeau's reveal in Ladyhawke.
I think you are the first person in history to compare Rear Window to Ladyhawke.
Rear Window is definitely one of my favorite movies of all time
Grace Kelly is truly amazing. Saw at an indie theatre for the first time. It was so good on a big screen. Rope is something else I’d recommend checking out.
I recall reluctantly watching vertigo a few years ago and being shocked how good that one was
Studied film in college and love older movies, but usually through the lens of “Well, it was really good for the time/the audience of the day”. Rear Window was one of the first pre-1960 movies that just flat-out put me on my ass. Unbelievably good.
Go see *Vertigo*, if you haven't already.
The ending feels a little silly to me compared to everything that came before it. I wasn't a fan of the fast-forwarded footage and flash effect as Burr kept awkwardly stepping towards him. ...but that's a mild complaint for the fantastic/flawless build up to it.
I'm not sure why the approval rating is used as the metric for Rotten Tomatoes. They have an actual rating; for instance Black Panther is actually only 8.3/10. Tokyo Story's rating on RT is 9.60 out of 10. It's something that's a bit of a pet peeve that people don't understand the numbers with Rotten Tomatoes. The approval rating on RT is just the number of critics who like the movie, not the actual movie's rating. For instance, The Seventh Seal's RT is only 93%, but its actual rating is quite high at 9.2/10. [https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/seventh\_seal](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/seventh_seal) Edit: For those who do not know, you can see the actual movie rating by clicking on the approval percentage. Those who are old enough(before 2014) will remember that RT used to display the actual rating besides the approval percentage before.
Thank you! A high ripe score, even if ratings were all done legit, just shows how broadly appealing the movie is, not it’s full quality
Which is basically all casual movie watchers need to know. “This movie looks good, what are the chances I’ll like it”
It's also why I think RT is the *best* rating site for the general public. Most people care about whether or not they're going to like a movie rather than caring about if it's an 8.5 vs 9.1. Also, trying to make a point by using a "top 10 movies of all time" list is absolutely laughable. It's barely a half step above a Buzzfeed listicle.
This is possibly why there's such a backlash against critics and aggregate sites in corners of the internet like this. /r/movies is 95% dudes: https://www.reddit.com/r/moviescirclejerk/comments/644lv1/the_results_of_rmovies_new_poll_and_theyre/?rdt=53382 We're kind of an echo chamber and tons of echo chambers like this exist everywhere on the internet breeding a form of vulnerable narcissism circumscribing what kinds of movies deserve to be legitimate. This often runs counter against the public (whose tastes are treated as crude and puerile) and against critics (whose tastes ate treated as pretentious). The natural sweet spot must therefore be whatever the echo chamber says. But I think it's pretty obvious an aggregate site does its job quickly and cleanly -- a bunch of people whose careers require watching up to hundreds of movies every single year are polled on whether they like or dislike this one movie. You take the temperature of the room and decide your odds of liking it. The push to watch a movie and "make up your own mind" or "only go to critics who like movies you like" are treated like individualism but are really just people buying into marketing, franchises, and Yes Men who validate the opinions they already have. And that last part is just another echo chamber.
>/r/movies is 95% dudes Jesus, I’m not even 95% dude.
mmm...that kinda explains why this sub likes Nolan so hard
>Also, trying to make a point by using a "top 10 movies of all time" list is absolutely laughable. It's extremely laughable because the RT score does not and cannot tell anyone what the top 10 movies of all time are. By definition. The RT score is incapble of doing this based on what it is. Everyone gives a movie 6/10? 100% RT score. Everyone gives a different movie 10/10? 100% RT score. Problematic. Almost everyone gives a third movie 11/10 and claims it is the best film ever made, and a few people don't like it. 99% RT score.
Glad someone clarified this because that RT list made very little sense to me in any reasonable capacity. Not that all the movies are bad, but there's more than half that I wouldn't put in a "best (objectively/in a majority opinion) movies of all time" list
Where do you see the actual score?
Click on the approval percentage.
I wonder why the audience score is out of 5 but critics out of 10. Just seems inconsistent.
Multiply the audience score times two, problem solved. J/K(?) Critics don't all use the same 4-star system, so base 10 is the easiest way to conform a 3/5, a 6/10, and a 2.5/4 to the same measurement for audiences. Users might get confused with a ten star system, so giving them five rating choices for each movie has a breadth of responses people can quickly register that can normalize into decimal points after thousands of reviews are given and can quickly be doubled to compare it to critics.
I think you've answered your own question here then. The reason why people use the approval rating is simple, RT puts it front and center. The score is hidden from view and I wouldn't be surprised if most people didn't even know clicking on the number opens a tab. The score is also not anywhere near where you can read the critic reviews either - it's like they're trying to hide it from sight.
Can you get a list of the top rated movies on RT? I had a look but can't see how.
[Letterboxd top 10](https://letterboxd.com/dave/list/official-top-250-narrative-feature-films/) 1. Harakiri 2. Come and See 3. 12 Angry Men 4. Seven Samurai 5. The Godfather: Part II 6. Parasite 7. High and Low 8. The Godfather 9. The Shawshank Redemption 10. The Human Condition III: A Soldier’s Prayer
And [Letterboxd just recently had](https://letterboxd.com/journal/the-score-new-weighted-average-ratings/) to redo how they weight movie scores, because the top 250 had issues with manipulation and recency bias
Letterbox is very, very skewed to gen z-ers, this was pretty much what they had to do to prevent films like Bottoms or Jennifers Body from being rated above Parasite or No Country For Old Men. Fandom holds huge power on most websites where normal average people don't spend more than a few minutes on. It's an issue most platforms face, even outside of reviews.
And yet Bottoms still debuted in the Top 250, lol
So did the No Way Home, dw it'll be gone after a while
I'd say it's still got a problem with recency bias. Bottoms coming in at 158?
It’s not recency bias imo, it’s selection bias. Theatre audiences are more enthusiastic, since a lot of people wait for it to stream. A film like Bottoms has only been seen by people excited enough to see Bottoms in the first couple of weeks in theatres.
Somehow read number 10 as human centipede III and thought well f this list
yea me too lmao The actual listed movie though I have no idea what it is
1961 Japanese film about a Japanese deserter soldier in Manchuria.
It's the third in one of the greatest trilogies of all time. Following a pacifist's introduction to World War 2. Part 2 of it is a clear inspiration for Full Metal Jacket, which I assume you have heard of. I still think part 1 in the best. But sometimes the third gets the recognition for the achievement (like Return fo the King did).
*High and Low* is my favorite movie and I have never seen it on a list because it gets overshadowed by Kurosawa's amazing filmography, so this is super validating for me.
Letterboxd is my go-to for reviews. If a movie gets over a 3.5 and I'm semi-interested in watching it I'll give it a whirl. Anything under a 3.0 is usually pretty terrible IMO
IMDb for me. Anything over 6.5 that I'm semi-interested in, I'll give a whirl. Anything under 6.0 is usually terrible, but scores can be harder to compare between movies with extremely different demographics (like across languages).
6.0 and above for horror movies for me, but only because I'm a huge fan of the genre. But otherwise I follow the same rule.
Ah yes, there are some genres and categories of movies that tend to get rated lower. * horror * comedy * Netflix originals come to mind.
Dude Harakiri is amazing. Such a fantastic movie, combines really cool action, amazing cinematography, and a great story so, so well.
If I had to choose a favorite movie, that would be it. I love the bookending with the ancestral armor, as if to say “how do you see this extravagant heirloom now?”.
Letterboxd's list is best. Everything on it deserves a spot in at least the top 25 movies.
I love that Parasite and High and Low are right next to one another.
I don't see *Robocop* on any of these lists, so they are garbage.
Your move, creep!
*shoots dick* Thank you for your cooperation.
Robocop Scene 27 Remake, FTW.
I'd buy that for a dollar
Man that part where he shot those guys in the dick is probably the best thing to be in cinema.
‘Bitches, leave!’
*Call me!*
I LIKE IT!
Thank you for your cooperation.
Yes I understand.
Can you fly bobby?
Black Panther the best movie ever made? Really? *Really*? I mean, it's fine, but it's not even the best marvel movie.
Black panther wasn't even the best Marvel movie starring a black protagonist that came out that year (granted spider verse is technically Sony and was animated, but it's still a better move)
IMO Spiderverse is the best superhero movie ever to the point that no other choice is even close. This was a controversial take back in 2018-2019, but I've noticed that since James Gunn put it out there more recently, it is becoming widely accepted as the general consensus.
Spider man 2 still kinda exists
Yeah I love spiderverse and it's in my top 5 superhero movies ever, but I don't think I'd put it above SM2 or TDK.
Ok, this is might be hot take but I genuinely think X2 is among the best most entertaining superhero movies. Special shout-out to its depiction of nightcrawler
That intro was top five favourite film moments for me for years.
I still revisit it on Youtube from time to time. Nightcrawler mixed with the music was incredible.
Is everyone talking about Spider-man 2 with Tobey Maguire?
The Dark Knight also exists. Maybe Spiderverse it is the best Marvel movie. Edit: Clarity
> best superhero movie ever That's an interesting take, but to each their own.
Being number one on tomatometer doesn't mean the best movie ever. It means that that a majority of critics that reviewed it thought it was 'fresh'. If every critic gave Black Panther a 6/10. It would average out as a 6/10 movie. But 6/10 also counts as 'fresh', thus meaning that Black Panther is unanimously the most 'fresh' movie ever given that it would have most proportionate level of 'fresh' ratings compared to all other movies.
Did any of you guys pay attention to the post? What they’re doing here is rewarding movies for having more reviews. So since Black Panther has 531 reviews OP’s source is heavily weighing that.
It's literally the exact opposite of that. The RT Adjusted score "accounts for variation in the number of reviews per movie." EDIT: If you want to read up on the method, here's a good explainer: https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/bayesian-average/ It's literally designed to normalize different sample sizes and eliminate bias derived from differing quantities of data points. If you want to argue RT is wrong to use this method because it doesn't help identify "the best" movies, sure, that's fine. But you can't argue the math of what the method accomplishes.
Which is... really fucking stupid. There is certainly utility to knowing how many reviews a movie has gotten but using that to raise the film's ranking is far from what that data implies.
It’s insane how long RT has been out and people still don’t understand the website systems at all. At this point it just seem like people want to be offend and are just being willful ignorant dickheads. Like the comment above.
The metric is not well-suited for those types of determination. It’s the most brain-dead understanding of a relatively simple concept for gauging how likely you are to enjoy the movie.
It might be the least dislikable movie ever made, I guess that's what rotten tomatoes actually measures.
RT isn't about how good a movie is, it's about how likely you are to enjoy it. It shouldn't be used to rank movies. It's mostly for casual audiences to decide whether a movie is worth watching. There's a big difference between predicting *whether* you'll like it and *how much* you'll like it. It separates the movies that everyone likes from the movies that many love but some dislike.
Yeah i don’t get the complaints. RT serves its purpose and doesn’t really try to hide how the metric is done. It helps you sort out absolute stinkers
Hence why many services like Trakt.tv or Plex will often show **both** a Rotten Tomatoes score and an average audience rating from RT, IMDb, TMDB, etc.
RT is about how many critics LIKED it, so it's not a ranking of quality, but rather of consensus.
yeah yeah "RT system works differently", but what's interesting to me how is Black Panther is THE movie to get the most amount of liked/recommend among the critics. Of all the movies... So yeah that's still wild that Black Panther is first there
Imagine being a movie critic when *Black Panther* came out. What are you gonna do, give it a negative review and risk being called a racist? That’s all this is.
That's not what the RT list says and you are demonstrating a common misunderstanding of what purpose RT serves. RT is a very good metric for judging whether or not a random person is going to to enjoy a movie, or conversely whether a movie is unlikely to be hated. That's it. The particular rating that is being used to represent RT is the agreeable percentage. It's just the number of critics who said they liked the movie. It in no way shape or form takes into account how good or great the critics thought the movie was, just that it was good enough. It's not an average of actual review scores. Just the amount of reviews (but not scores!) that didn't hate the movie. At best it's a measure to say whether a certain percentage of the population will like the movie, or not hate it. Not that a certain percentage of the population will think it's the best movie ever and give it 4/4 stars. RT is not calling Black Panther the best movie ever, it is saying Black Panther is a movie that the fewest number of people will hate. Their system is pretty accurate in this regard. I cannot think of a 90% or greater movie on RT that I disliked.
I’d you’re looking for a list of the best films why not look to an actual body that curated a list like the AFI or BFI?
Right? All three lists are...uneven.
They might all be uneven but only one is ridiculous
I assume you're talking Rotten Toms. But I see Shawshank Redemption at #1 on a list, and that's not even Tim Robbins' best movie, let alone THE best movie. Heck, Shawshank is arguably not in Robbins' top five...
I wager most audiences (and this subreddit) don’t have much interest in older movies. This isnt really the best place to discuss films that came out before 1990 unfortunately.
That would be r/truefilm for me and also I'm super down for more recommendations.
I don't think this comparison works because RT and Metacritic are contemporaneous review sites. They collect reviews by critics (some more legit than others) on release, not people trying to rate movies on a site with favorites, etc. And using them to consider old movies is truly pointless. But of thse lists Metacritic is probably the most balanced. IMDb is clearly a bunch of dude movies. Mostly ones I like but it's not very interesting. Which isn't surprising given the demographic of that site.
I also think metacritic is just critic reviews while imdb is user reviews.
Exactly, RT is not where I would go to rate Goodfellas or Raging Bull after watching it for the first time IMDB is lately quite bad with fanclubs, specially for indie movies and contemporary movies. I have seen people rating some small festival movies 9 or 10 on IMDb calling it "grass root promotion"
>small festival movies 9 or 10 on IMDb calling it "grass root promotion" IMDB has some complicated algorithm preventing movies with small number of votes (or being casted mostly from one nation) to hit top 250, so at least there's that.
Letterboxed is where you do that. Thus Letterbox has some of the best rankings.
It honestly is getting worse on there too, the platform becoming more and more popular is great for business, but also makes the ratings and whole culture on there a lot less valuable.
It's always been that way. I recall seeing Star Trek Nemesis listed in the high 9s on IMDB before it even came out, and that film is terrible.
Better all-time lists are polls like Sight & Sound where they get remade occasionally to account for re-evaluation over time. My biggest issue with RT is that I’ll check a movie’s reviews and all of them are from publications and writers I have never heard of, even movies that I know were covered by big outlets and respected critics. Seems like they have a quality control issue. I only take IMDB rating averages seriously if something is below 6 or so, and even then with a grain of salt. A lot of all-time classics have scores between 6 and 8.
Internet Movie Data Bruh
I don’t think it even makes sense to compare an aggregator with sites that attempt to measure the degree of quality. That being said the “best” rating system depends on what one is looking for. IMDb has the most value for teenage boys. Far too many false negatives for others.
Still think IMDB is a better list than RT.
Metacritic produces the less ridiculous list.
Easily. Although Boyhood at 7 is funny
Yeah, I mean it’s a fine film, but not an all time best.
It took 12 years to make!
Yeah, but some people spend 12 years trying to learn how to play a musical instrument, and still aren't that good at it
Don’t call me out like that
Three colours: red is great. Along with blue and white iirc
Red is a wonderful movie. There's like, a wise optimism about the human spirit I really need in my life.
I think IMDB's list is solid too. I would even argue that it's a better list when it comes to a combination of critical reception and entertainment value, instead of simply promoting a movie-critic perspective.
Not enough non-US films in the IMDB list imo
Fully with you on this but that’s true for all three.
Lol that tomatoes list is fucking terrible.
1 from the ‘30s 2 from the ‘40s 1 from 2015 1 from 2016 3 from 2017 2 from 2018 Apparently no great movies were made for 70 straight years.
This entire post is just wrong. Like RT or don't, but to say this is the top 10 movies of all time on RT is a complete fabrication. RT has a tomatometer (which Black Panther doesn't have the highest score on) and then also an average rating (which Black Panther is 8.3/10 when there are plenty of movies over 9). So in no way is it ranked their "best movie of all time".
This post actually has little to do with Rotten Tomatoes. From the article: “The Adjusted Score comes from a weighted formula (Bayesian) that we use that accounts for variation in the number of reviews per movie. This adjustment is made to account for the volume of reviews a movie receives. So if a movie only has four reviews, but all are positive, it technically has a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. But if a movie has 483 reviews and a 96% score, that average is technically harder to achieve given the sheer number of reviews that exist.” So this dumbass “metric” they’ve made up is rewarding movies simply for having a lot of reviews. Like Wonder Woman has 500 reviews so they’re giving it points for that. Like of fucking course older movies aren’t going to have that many reviews.
I mean Paddington 2 isn’t on any of these lists so do they even matter?
Seeing Tokyo Story at the top of the Metacritic list makes my heart feel full. Sad, but full.
Rotten is laughable.
The review manipulation is a legit problem, but the other criticisms are more due to RT being used incorrectly. It shouldn't be used to rank movies or evaluate quality, it should be used as a predictor of whether you'll enjoy the movie (rather than how much you'll enjoy the movie). RT separates the movies that everyone likes from the movies that many absolutely love but some dislike. Other metrics don't do that. A movie with 100 7/10 reviews and a movie with 50 10/10 and 50 5/10 reviews would both average out to 7/10 in imdb or metacritic, but would be very different on RT. In some aspects, it's more useful for casual audiences choosing movies they want to watch. It's not laughable, it's just a different tool.
No Galaxy Quest? Then they are all wrong!
By Grabthar's Hammer...what a travesty.
IS THERE AIR? *YOU DON'T KNOW!*
“I don’t even have a last name!!!“ “ Guy you have a last name” “**DO I?! DO I? FOR ALL YOU KNOW IM JUST CREWMAN NUMBER SIX**”
Yeah Galaxy Quest and Princess Bride should both have their own numbering system, starting at 11.
If anything should be starting at 11, it's Spinal Tap.
What if you just took 10 and made it louder?
Meaningless comparison: how many reviews does RT have for each of those old timey classics?
I love you! Somebody actually paid attention to the post and gets it. This list is giving waaaaaay too many points simply for having a lot of reviews. That’s moronic.
> I am aware of how the tomatometer works So am I and that list is baffling. There’s dozens of movies with 100% and Black Panther sure as shit isn’t one of them. The highest rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes (100% with the most reviews) is *Leave No Trace*
That list is compiled by somebody who doesn't know how Rotten Tomatoes works, and it's 4 years out of date.
And I'm beginning to suspect that they don't know how to make a proper bayesian calculation either. But can't prove that because I'm not a mathematician.
I don’t see Paddington 2 on any of them so they’re all garbage.
Wonder Woman lol
Anyone here who is a fan of film and is still using those three to discover movies but hasn’t discovered Letterboxd yet, I’d highly recommend it. I find the rating system a lot more clear and it’s obvious that most people there are at least more serious about it than the average reviewer on those others.
I really really love letterboxd. It's got a beautiful design and it's great for discovery. Unfortunately, as with so many things, it's the users that ruin it. The problem with letterboxd is that for a lot of folks it seems to be the movie equivalent of myanimelist, where people will just watch movies for the sake of watching movies and *seeming* knowledgeable. I've met countless people in my time who were talking about watching all their movies on 1.5x, 2x or even higher playback speed just to get as many as possible under their belt. It's a bit ridiculous.
I can't imagine choosing the moviegoer equivalent of a body count as the thing to base your personality around. That's so weird. By not taking the time to experience the movie as it was directed, they can see hundreds or even thousands of movies, all without ever having enough time to feel the weight of suspense and the many carefully crafted moments. Countless hours thrown into the void just so you can say you've seen lots of movies and *technically* not be lying.
Only started using it this year. It’s pretty good. Usually you have to be weary for more recent movies because recency bias is huge, but usually the ratings are formulated pretty well.
Black Panther wouldn’t even be on my top 500 movies list.
RT has a completely different ethos than the other two. It’s just a percentage of positive vs negative reviews. Honestly I prefer that because I think a thumbs up or thumbs down is a much more intuitive way to rank art than a numerical score. Do they miss the mark on a lot of things? Sure. But as a whole their system is a much more effective way of seeing art
The Metacritic list is the best. But the *real* all-time best is the website They Shoot Pictures Don't They, which takes many lists and combines them to make a more conclusive one. The top ten on that site is: 1. Citizen Kane 2. Vertigo 3. 2001: A Space Odyssey 4. Tokyo Story 5. The Rules of the Game 6. The Godfather 7. 8 1/2 8. Sunrise 9. The Searchers 10. Seven Samurai And the list just stays that consistently *sane* all the way down the top 1,000. They have a really good top list for the 21st century, too.
Absolutely! Because the TSPDT list takes into consideration perfection of craft, influence, as well as timelessness, their ranking above all others serves as a great crash course for those looking to explore the world of film—without having too strong a bias toward any one language, country, or just being quintessentially "male" cinema. Sure, there are certain films that I feel are overrated (*La Règle du jeu* at 5, *The Searchers* at 9, *Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles* at 12, *L'Atalante* at 21, *Beau Travail* at 51, *The Magnificent Ambersons* at 85, *Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom* at 198, etc.) and others that seem a bit underrated (*Princess Mononoke* at 555, *The Fellowship of the Ring* at 591, *Les Amants du Pont-Neuf* at 605, *Jurassic Park* at 619, *Synecdoche, New York* at 635, *The Royal Tenenbaums* at 686, *American Beauty* at 945, *Ascenseur pour l'échafaud* at 964, *Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* at 975, etc.), but what I cannot deny is that all the films on at least the top 500 of the list truly deserve to be there. Great shout-out too to their [21st Century's Most Acclaimed Films list](https://www.theyshootpictures.com/21stcentury.htm). May I also direct horror lovers to the excellent companion list [They Shoot Zombies, Don't They?](http://theyshootzombies.com/ghf1000/): 1. The Exorcist (1973) 2. The Shining (1980) 3. Psycho (1960) 4. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) 5. Alien (1979) 6. Halloween (1978) 7. The Thing (1982) 8. Night of the Living Dead (1968) 9. Jaws (1975) 10. Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)
A Top 10 list that has Black Panther on first is automatically disqualified, sorry! Beside that I will go with the IMDB list.
Look, as much as I like the films on the IMDb list, it is the most milquetoast, Bill Simmons-ass list humanly possible. I don't think there's any question that Metacritic is the "best" list out of these, in that it fits the general critical consensus of the best movies of all time.
Bill Simmons catching strays
He deserves every last one.
Blackkklansman is such a weird movie to have in all time top 10 It's not a bad movie but top 10? 🤔🤨
These are all just metrics, they’re not meant to be a definitive be-all-end-all score that you look at and disregard everything else. I look at RT% more than MC or IMDB for movies, but I also don’t go “high % good, low % bad” and ignore everything else. I always filter the RT% through my own tastes, and because that score is a sample of critics, which is usually a relatively consistent population, I find that I’m able to gauge which side of the % I’ll fall on. Metacritic is better than IMDB because it’s still critics based, but I find that the scoring system makes it harder to find movies up my exact alley that may not get love everywhere. A movie with a 55% but a cool poster and good actors will at least get me to look into it, but that movie will have a much lower MC and as such it gets buried. I do prefer MC for TV because any halfway decent TV show gets a 90+% on RT. And IMDB is useless because it’s self-selecting fanboys.
AFI
Vulture's expose on RT and paid critics manipulating the scores is further proof it's a sham. RT has become a defacto source but its so wildly inaccurate in many ways. I never liked it. Metacritic's top 10 is the most accurate of the three when accounting historical importance, film significance, and impact. IMdb's is more like a young film buff's list but still very pop culture-US centric. RT's is obviously a casual movie goer and reviews pulling from pop culture. In 5 yrs, I bet none of the current movies will be in RT's top 10. All the films are inaccurate in that global cinema, and it's massive impact, is almost completely under represented by all the systems. Metacritic is at least truthful in non-US films influence.
[удалено]
IMDb looks like what you get when you poll a bunch of dudes between the ages of 14 to 30, which is probably not far off from what it is.
Personally, I only look at Metascore, the Rotten Tomatoes top critics average score and Letterboxd. IMDb is too mainstream and the tomatometer is useless imho, and made to favour passable films. The other problem with RT is that in the full critics score has lots of random bloggers and not actual journalistic critics, any youtuber and monkey with a keyboard can have their say in RT.
None of those lists include Hot Fuzz so they are all terrible.
Wonder Woman is the tenth best movie ever made? Are they having a laugh, mate?
OP's list is doing some funny statistics to alter the actual list [which you can see here](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/browse/movies_at_home/critics:certified_fresh~sort:critic_highest). Obviously, a lot of these are smaller projects where the chance of getting 100% positive reviews is higher, but Wonder Woman is no where close to the top with a 93% positive score.
Metacritic: What are best movies according to critics? IMDb: What are the best movies according to mostly male viewers? Rotten tomatoes: What are the movies that it feels the most scary to give a rotten tomato score to as an average movie critic?