I’ve been wondering for a while if a Nate Silver like system of rating critics might be a better approach. Then you might get a more accurate accounting of critical reviews.
> I’ve been wondering for a while if a Nate Silver like system of rating critics might be a better approach
Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome. If you want something useful for you, you could vuild a model with your ratings of movies you've seen, then then takes critics ratings of those movies to build a model of the relationship between individual critics ratings (in isolation or combination) and predicted ratings for you, but other than that you'd just be rating how well one proxy for “will I like it” matches a different proxy.
The only reliable system is, unfortunately, a lot of work and generalizes very poorly. You need to pay close attention to individual critics so you understand their tastes and how your own tastes intersect with theirs.
This is why the pre-internet system of reading your local newspaper and seeing what their film reviewer thought worked okay. From long experience you'd know that the reviewer e.g. loved anything with anti-war themes, had really high standards for romance subplots, and couldn't stand fantasy. Thus you could fit their review into your own standards and perhaps wind up interpreting an intensely negative review as a recommendation that you'd love that film.
just thumbs up or down or quickly rate 50 movies then essentially assign critics point values based on closeness to your votes and rank them strongest to least and bam you've got a personal rating system that's way better than anything they've got now
>Critics aren't a proxy or predictor of some objectively verifiable outcome
Critical Drinker ones usually align quite well with both my opinion and the audience score.
The guardian came with the following real headline in 2019:
>Forget Joker: here's the film you should see about an extremist loner
While Todd Phillips’ vacuous DC origins tale fails to go beneath its grimy surface, low-budget drama Cuck offers a braver alternative
I've been using the website Movie Lens for over a decade and it works kind of like this, except you're not comparing to critics, it's just other users' average score
Yeah, I mean, its a pretty basic application of the general recommender-system concept, there's probably lots of places where there is an approximation of it for movies.
Criticker (https://www.criticker.com/) works like this too and gives really good recommendations but even keeping track of all the movies you've watched and rating them is more work than most people want to do.
538 compares polling data against actual election results. What are you going to compare a critic's ratings against? If you compare them to the average critic or audience rating for a given movie, you will end up with a system that punishes any independent thought.
Box office draw? Or maybe the "legs" (how long a movie stays in the theater). You would need to adjust for movie type though, you wouldn't want to directly compare an independent documentary on an obscure subject vs. Disney's latest Marvel movie with a 500 million dollar marketing budget.
