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Comment by a8da6b0c91d | Hacker News Reader

The only way Rotten Tomatoes is useful is if you look only at the negative ratings. All kinds of horrible schlock that has mass appeal gets "certified fresh." But isolating negative reviews: If idiots dislike it then it's probably good; If the negative reviews sound cogent then it's probably bad.

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I usually go for a metric along the lines of Chesterton's Fence: do the negative critiques seem like they're dismissing the film out-of-hand, or do they seem to show an understanding what it was going for and still think it failed to do it well? Roger Ebert was usually pretty good about this, which gives his truly scathing reviews that much more bite [1].

[1]: http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/battlefield-earth-2000

my favorite bit: "The director, Roger Christian, has learned from better films that directors sometimes tilt their cameras, but he has not learned why."

I generally feel the same, but was woefully misled by a detailed, thorough, but overall negative review of "Spring[1]", which I found to be a delightful genre-bending tale that really surprised me.

I'm not suggesting it was the best movie of the year, by any stretch, but where the reviewer kept insisting that the alleged plot holes were completely unexplainable, I found that perhaps she just didn't "Get It", because not only were the holes absent from my viewing, but where she found holes, I found explanations that actually made sense (y'know, within the context of a film anyway).

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3395184/

The problem with Rotten Tomatoes scores is that people want to treat them as a measure of how good a film is...it's a natural tendency considering it's a score on a continuum. But what Rotten Tomatoes scores actually represent are a measure of what percentage of people a film will please enough to give a positive review. Just like the The World's Funniest Joke [1] (which most people find "meh, kinda funny"), a movie can rate very highly on Rotten Tomatoes without rating very highly on anyone's list of movies.

But most of the films we'll enjoy are more polarizing. A smaller group of people will really like the film and a sizable group will dislike it. As such, Rotten Tomatoes is a really terrible way to choose a good movie and a really great way to avoid bad ones.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World%27s_funniest_joke

Movies on Rotten Tomatoes only need to have 60% positive reviews to be "certified fresh." It's a low bar. If you want to find good movies start at the ones over 80%.

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