The people who leave IMDB reviews are probably also pretty far away from the average audience - only a small set of people post reviews their and there’s probably a lot of sampling bias towards film nerds.
Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
121–130 of 421 posts
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#122So 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?
No post body was provided.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#123Just from a review reader perspective:
I don't want critic scores to necessarily go hand in hand with audience scores.
I have no idea what a given audience member wants. Random user reviews might rave that "Fast and Furious" speaks to the truth of the human condition, but I'm kinda skeptical and don't really know what that means coming from their perspective ... maybe question that person's life / film viewing experience.
Now if the Fast and Furious is a fun summer flick that isn't dumb enough to make me roll my eyes too often, I want to know that. I might be in the mood for that. But few if any user reviews will tell me that reliably.
I look for different things from critics and users.
The ratings matter less to me than where they are coming from / what they tell me.
I also miss Roger Ebert.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#124Film reviews are not supposed to be a predictor of general popularity I think
It really depends on the critic. Some critics try to be an "everyman viewer" and break down the films they see based on whether they think folks will like them. Others just have the attitude of "my taste, take it or leave it."
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
I think most blockbuster "entertainment" movies are MORE heavy handed in their preaching. The big differentiator for me is that they preach what is already assumed. It's not that they don't lecture you, it's that they lecture you in what you already agree with. In that sense entertainment-movies are more like sermons from your pastor. It's a reframing of a story you've already been told a million times, so your brain can just switch off and absorb the message uncritically.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#126No post body was provided.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#127Just from a review reader perspective: I don't want critic scores to necessarily go hand in hand with audience scores. I have no idea what a given audience member wants. Random user reviews might rave that "Fast and Furious" speaks to the truth of the human condition, but I'm kinda skeptical and don't really know what that means coming from their perspective ... maybe question that person's life / film viewing experi…
This is the whole point of reviews I feel - you get to know a reviewer and you can use their review to decide if you want to see it. They may absolutely hate the movie, but the way they hate it makes you know you'll enjoy it.
"Review aggregators" have killed much of that I feel.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#128Were 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…
That doesn't ring true to me at all. In aggregate, the opinions of professional critics always push me towards better movies or tv shows. Go watch some of the best rated movies of the year on Rotten Tomatoes by critics, then the best rated by users. It's immediately clear the critics picks are not just better but leaps and bounds better. I have the same experience with restaurants. What my friends say is their favorite restaurant is usually something like a local hole in the wall taco place that makes amazing carne asada. That's not bad, and it's great for that one person or that one dish/experience. But generally a pick from the Michelin guidebook is going to be a completely different experience start to finish, down to the smallest details. It's objectively better.
It sounds like you, understandably, are very much on defense and think of critics as "arty farty" from the jump. Perhaps you saw someone say a super artistic french film was great and it seemed like nonsense to you, or you saw some chef serve up a gastro-scientific jelly bean for $500 and it's colored your view pretty heavily.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also possible for critics to have systematically different preferences than movie-goers that don't deserve to be described pejoratively as "out of touch" or "snobby." In fact, that's precisely what I would expect and hope to see from people who are professional critics. I wouldn't want expect a list of best restaurants from a food critic to be identical to the list of top restaurant chains by revenue (1: McDonal…
> It's also possible for critics to have systematically different preferences than movie-goers that don't deserve to be described pejoratively as "out of touch" or "snobby." When the person writing a review has "systematically different preferences" from the people they're writing for, "out of touch" is exactly the right description for that ("snobby" - not necessarily).
Or put another way, maybe you’re not the intended audience if you’re reading a film critic’s work only to decide if you might like a film and you repeatedly find that your tastes are very different than that critic’s.
Re: Are film critics losing sync with audiences?
#130One 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…
> most professional critics have to review every single movie This isn't true. Quite far from it, in fact. Manohla Dargis at the NY Times, for example, averages only about 2 reviews per week. There are many more releases than that. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone does even fewer. Same with Justin Chang at the LA Times. Etc, etc. IMO, the explanation is going to be multifactorial. Your "correct conclusion" probably exp…
A comment on the article was: """
I reviewed films for the whole of the nineties for the BBC and local press in Manchester rarely missing any new releases. With this luxury and dream job though comes a responsibility and after a while it became obvious that I was suffering from Movie fatigue.
It was easy to dismiss much of Hollywood’s fare as formulaic and worthless because we had seen too much and seen better. Some of the movies I panned were perfectly good films and many were extremely successful and popular with audiences, but for me they were dull, and despite fabulous production values left me cold. Mark Kermode (Film Critic BBC) was one of my contemporaries and he said: “You have to see everything so that when something comes along that is good you will really notice it.” Of course, this exacerbated the fatigue and often meant that we were too quick to judge, and after a while, very little appealed because we had set ourselves far too high a standard to be realistic about the film’s quality.
If you look at the reviews in The Guardian, you will see more bad reviews that good. You might argue that a bad review is much better copy than a good review so there might be an editorial decision in there. To a certain extent Movie critics can be a poor parameter for quality and an injudicious contribution to its success or failure.
After ten years of reviewing films, I knew it was time to stop. I wasn’t enjoying it and I was probably doing some disservice to the film industry. Less is so much more. Harry Stafford – The Manchester Film School
"""
And, perhaps Manohla Dargis and Peter Travers watch far more movies than they write reviews for.