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 1ST
CHOICE
Rotten
Tomatoes
Rotten
Tomatoes provides a unique and rather
tongue-in-cheek approach to summing up
the general consensus of opinion from
a large database of reviewers.
According to their "tomatometer"
if a movie gets more than 60% approval
on weighted average, it's fresh, or if
it gets less, it's rotten.
But
don't worry if the sound of
tomatometers and rotten tomatoes
doesn't appeal, this site is an exceptionally
good tool for getting quick consensus
on critical opinion of a movie, then
linking you to the full detail of the
reviews. Their overall score for a
movie is given as a total percentage,
and is based on a weighted average of
all critics reviews, each of which is
shown in brief and linked so you can
click through to read any or every every one.
It is now
an extremely popular site with
something approaching 3 million
readers a month and boasts accolades
from the Chicago Sun-Times, The New
Yorker, USA Today and others. The site
is the front end of a fairly
substantial database with more than 87,000 movie titles
and 200,000 review links.
So if a
fast, fun and informative approach to
movie reviews is what you are looking
for this could be the site for you.
TOP CHOICE
Metacritic
Metacritic
provides a
roundup of "what the critics are
saying", displayed from best to worst
reviews by movie, and assign an
overall score to the general consensus
on the movie.
They
do this by taking a cross-section of
reviews from a group of
respected movie critics. Then they use
their own in-house "metascore"
to combine all of the individual
review scores into an overall grade
for each movie. That
way you can gauge the critical
consensus at a glance.
All
reviews are linked so you can go
forward and read the detail from each
individual critic.
So
whether you want a quick consensus, or
want to read all the reviews
individually, Metacritic provides a
fast and effective way to get to that
information. They
also provide the same service for
games and music.
TOP CHOICE
Check
The Grid
Check
The Grid take movie reviews from a
number of notable sources and read
them all, assigning a simple color
rating to each. They then present the
information visually,
like
a set of traffic lights for each
movie, but where you can see what
color each reviewer gave it.
In
essence they have reduced all the
critic's information on a movie to
three colors, where green means go, yellow means
caution, and red means don't go.
They
then show all the reviews,
represented by color on a grid (hence
their name), so you can see all the reviews together
and get an
instant visual consensus on the movie.
If
you then want to read the individual
reviews, each one is linked so you can
get the full content.
This
provides a fast visual consensus of
critical opinion from a number of
sources, backed up by ready access to
the detail of the actual reviews.
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Artists