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Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

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Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#111

Post by setr »

bee_rider wrote: post #85
tshaddox wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The comment literally states that it's one of the questions they ask, which is the exact opposite of a gotcha question. Huh? "Gotcha question" doesn't imply it's a single question that's not part of a series of questions. A "gotcha question" is simply a question designed such that it's very easy to respond with something that sounds bad or is incorrect.

Is it really easy not to come up with the desired explanation here? It seems like the most obvious possible answer, that people tend to watch the types of movies that they like. Actually it seems to provide almost no information unless their hiring pool is mostly candidates who utterly lack common sense.

I recall reading that someone found fizzbuzz (with nothing fancy) to be a highly effective filter for programming interviews

Hiring pools tend to be filled with nonsense candidates

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#112

Post by munk-a »

I think there are some confounding variables that make this analysis extremely difficult.

First off I'd like to establish that in the 90s film critics had no idea what audiences like, most of the famous film critics were film majors who values cinematography well above what standard audiences would rate it - a poorly shot movie with guns and explosions would be a box office darling while a black and white drama in the style of ingmar bergman would delight critics (I'm not badmouthing these movies btw - they just didn't tend to be audience favorites). Additionally, pre internet we essentially had no access to unprofessional opinions - hobby magazines and word of mouth were the only things that could counter a bad review from the globe or times.

Secondly, I think, like we saw with pretty much all "old media" that critics took their damn sweet time to transition over to the internet. In the early days of rotten tomatoes you'd rarely see newspaper critics within the tomatometer - those criticisms were the property of their respective media companies and they didn't want to give the milk away for free. As such it's taken a while for the professional grade critics to actually fully move into the new space - mostly by way of replacement. Old critics die and retire and new critics fresh out of film school start their career running a blog and being tech friendly.

From those two points, while I find the data in the article quite well calculated theoretically I think it's hard to really draw any conclusions - the conversion rate of critics would need to be better understood and the pre-internet critic inaccuracy would need to be evaluated. There are some great examples of films that were absolutely panned by critics but ended up being extremely beloved classics[1] and, then, we've got all the cult hits like RHPS which, when originally screened, had the vast majority of critics simply walk out on.

1. A NYT article about "classics" that got negative contemporary reviews on release https://archive.ph/kiDVH

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#113

Post by munk-a »

michaelmrose wrote: post #78
shantnutiwari wrote: post #26

Were they ever in sync? I've always seen critics as a "negative recommendation" -- if a critic recommends a movie, it's usually bad and vice versa (and like all rules there notable exceptions like Thor Ragnarok, which both critics and normal people loved). And this is true not just in movies but books as well. Critics in both domains love the "ooh lala, fancy pancy hard to understand arty farty" book/movie that doesn…

Have you ever considered that there might actually be something to "ooh lala, fancy pancy hard to understand arty farty" movies that you are merely unable to appreciate and that your failure to appreciate any virtue doesn't constitute proof of its nonexistence? The whole point of pursuing the opinion of critics isn't averaging them to see what smart people like its in finding critics whose taste isn't wholly out of l…

Artsy movies are great... sometimes, and unartsy movies are also great sometimes.

Sometimes I want to watch the Seventh Seal and sometimes I want to watch Die Hard - both movies have their place but a lot of critics tend to lean strongly into arthouse movies and sell them well above their actual appeal. I think one of the hardest parts of being a genuinely good critic is being able to leave your own tastes at the door when walking into a new performance - and those tastes are generally ones that have been honed by an education in classic works. Some movies use extremely bold cinematography choices to add a lot to their work (I'd point out Sin City and Schindler's List both of which made extremely good use of high contrast black and white (mostly) filming to add heaps to the story) but then you've got so-so art-house pieces that play into those familiar tropes without delivering anything of real value.

It takes a really good critic to watch a movie they really personally enjoyed and tell everyone that it's probably not for them - please do talk about what you liked to inform like minded people - but don't give a 5/5 just because it appealed to your specific tastes.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#114

Post by mrob »

bb88 wrote: post #82
Kranar wrote: post #8

One of the interview questions I ask all UX Researchers is to open up rottentomatoes, sort recent films by rating and then look at the movies that have the lowest critic scores. Almost always you can see the audience score for those movies is much higher than the critic scores. I then ask why this is the case. The overwhelming majority of answers involve critics being out of touch with the audience, critics being per…

I think another acceptable explanation is that movies are marketed not to everyone but to certain people. So say the latest horror flick that comes around is marketed to teens and 20-somethings. The over-30 crowd gets turned off by violence and gore. But that particular demographic loves it, and the more gore the more they like it. There's a certain group of people that loved Human Centipede, e.g. But it got terrible…

On the other hand, Ebert followed the critical consensus and gave Freddy Got Fingered (my personal pick for funniest movie of all time) a zero star rating. This is a gross-out comedy that succeeds spectacularly at what it set out to do, but very few critics were willing to judge it by the standards of the genre. The audience scores are very polarized (currently 56% positive on RT), but critic's reviews are only at 11%.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#117

Post by Izkata »

JaimeThompson wrote: post #110
chrismeller wrote: post #28

So the main takeaway here for me is that more low budget (“indie” or “film festival”, my terms) movies are getting to theaters and being loved by critics, but people hate them. My wife and I have a rule in our household. Anything that was awarded at a film festival (Sundance in particular) I will not watch with her. This analysis backs up the feelings I’ve had that lead to that agreement… Any movie that does well wit…

What sorts of films don't lecture?

Most entertainment-oriented films. There's a big difference between "has a message" (which those usually do include) and "lecture" aka "beat you over the head with".

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#118

Post by ashtonbaker »

Kranar wrote: post #58
ashtonbaker wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a clever way of looking at it. Did you come up with it yourself? If not, I wonder what you think it says about a person that they were exposed to this idea before they interviewed with you, versus after.

No I did not come up with it myself. It's a common pitfall in statistics known as selection bias [1]. My problem is that if I ask a researcher about selection bias, they have no problem defining it for me and even giving me a textbook example of it. But when I present to a researcher a real life scenario that is highly susceptible to selection bias, they will almost all fail to identify it. It's a problem where many…

If you're using "selection bias" to refer to the fact that these two groups are selecting movies using different, biased methods, doesn't that imply that there's some way of sampling that would not be biased? But no matter what you do, an average critic and an average moviegoer are likely to disagree on many films. I would expect the explanations behind this to be more of a function of differences between the groups, which explains 1. why critics will occasionally enjoy a film more than the general population, and 2. why this disagreement can drift over time. Both of which are not accounted for by your analysis. I'm definitely not saying you're wrong - quite the opposite, just that there are other interesting things to discover here.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#119

Post by shadowgovt »

> As making and releasing movies has become easier, we have seen an increase in the number of low budget films hitting the big screen. At the same time, these films have become increasingly more divisive, although I’m not sure why.

I believe we can expect one from the other. Hollywood and Rockefeller Plaza are huge gatekeeping infrastructures; the sheer number of specialists you need to get buy-in from to make a film in the traditional system means there are multiple layers of people with veto power (or creative control) over an idea.

Decreasing price-to-entry means more people can bypass larger pieces of those edifices, which means fewer gatekeepers between the creative and their idea hitting a screen. Couple that with increasingly bypassed distribution channels (not every film needs to hit a theater), and you're likely to see a more diverse set of minds creating content for people to consume.

Diversity can breed divisiveness if people are of a critical bent, and since we're talking about critics and film audiences, I think we'd expect that link in this context.

Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?

#120

Post by shadowgovt »

My favorite thing about film critique is the phenomenon of anti-signal.

There was a local-paper film critic who was just the most delightful curmudgeon. If there was a film done in any style that wasn't aping 1960 or earlier, he despised it.

But it made him a very useful barometer for me: I'd look at the movies he panned and go see those.

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