> Critics in general are bad signals.

Critics may be bad signals when conditioned on the things that you individually prefer. this is hardly an objective measure.

Your preference for user ratings could also be biased towards the kind of things that you enjoy about movies, which may align more with non-critics, while at the same time my preference for (aggregrated) critic ratings could be biased towards the things i enjoy about movies, which might align more with critics; those two sets of things might not exactly be the same. (i.e. there could be tribes that rate enjoyableness differently)

Lastly, there is this [1], which is tangential to your claim but worth considering what a good distribution of ratings should look like. Now even though the analysis isn't perfect, it's still interesting that _if_ the assumptions of the analysis were true, metacritic has the most well-behaved distribution.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108071

I'd add that, if you don't know the individual critic's taste, they might as well be another take on public opinion. There can be something to be gained, but for the everyday person, you are best off with "what did the general public think" and what did this person (whose tastes I know) think?

A good example (I think, at least when ignoring drama) is Total Biscuit. He makes it clear when playing a genre of game he doesn't care for or if a game is in a setting he loves. He lays it out and tries to be fair and objective (even if that pursuit is a fool's errand).

P.S. I'd also like to say that the pursuit of an unachievable goal (objectivity, perfection, etc...) is a noble pursuit even if unobtainable, as it will cause a drive to be better and improve. Rather than an excuse to be lazy since, "perfect/objective/... is impossible.

Also, an interesting thing about metacritic (at least from what I can remember) is that they are silent about how they weight differing review sites/critics in how they calculate their overall rating.

Whereas (as far as I know) RT has a simple average for critic reviews and general internet user reviews.

In general the trick with critics is to find those that you agree with on certain genres. No critic is really going to agree with you on everything. So find some that align with you on say action movies and some on dramas and interpolate a score. Eventually you learn their preferences and you can get a very good read on if you'll like a movie with just one or 2 critic reviews. You'll learn that some are into filming or score or other things more than you and you can ignore that.