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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

I don't necessarily disagree with this as a rule of thumb, but I thought it would be fun to come up with a few counter-examples. Most of these I would consider "artsy-fartsy" or "artsy-fartsy lite" movies that are popular with audiences but less so with critics.

Lost Highway (1997) - 68% Tomatometer - 87% Audience Score

Fight Club (1999) - 79% Tomatometer - 96% Audience Score

American Psycho (2000) - 68% Tomatometer - 85% Audience Score

Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 78% Tomatometer - 93% Audience Score

Dancer in the Dark (2000) - 69% Tomatometer - 91% Audience Score

Oldboy (2003) - 82% Tomatometer - 94% Audience Score

The Prestige (2006) - 77% Tomatometer - 92% Audience Score

Joker (2019) - 69% Tomatometer - 88% Audience Score

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You went for very old movies which skews your analysis.

A lot of the old movies you picked are famous and popular in movie pop culture. Audience scoring this in RT probably went out of their way to watch these films, they are not as organic as recent scores as you have a larger number audience scores created by movie lovers.

If you find examples post 2015 when RT became a mainstream scoring system that would be great.

Only movie that's current in your list is "The Joker" which among critics is considered to be a copycat of other critically acclaimed films (taxi driver, the comedian). This is a film that tried hard to look artsy fartsy but was not.

You're right, I explicitly went out of my way to find movies that are widely considered to be classics, but were not loved by critics. It's not an "analysis" of any kind, as I made clear in my post.

I think the critics are wrong about Joker. The fact that it's an homage to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy is completely intentional, to the point of casting Robert De Niro as the talk show host. I don't consider that a detraction from the film at all. Many critics also interpreted it as some kind of political document, which is totally off the mark. One of the big problems with criticism in the 21st century is that people have lost the ability to tell the difference between portraying something and endorsing it.

It would still be interesting to do that excersice but with more recent movies. I do think the formula works quite well.

As for the Joker I wasn't agreeing with the critics just describing the consensus based on reviews I've heard. To me personally it did feel like it took a bit too much inspiration from the movies it was trying to pay tribute to. When does a homage becomes a copy?

The political angle is irrelevant and I agree with you on that.

They’re both movies about disaffected young men in an urban setting. I don’t follow that it’s a copy beyond that. Their plots aren’t all that similar. Lots of movies have similar themes.

I find in the last decade or so, movies with a big disparity between Audience/Critics are often that way because of culture war silliness unrelated to the content of the actual film.

See -

Sound of Freedom (2023) - 60% Tomoatometer - 99% Audience Score

It's this. This is why TLJ got the high critics score. It was politically correct (all the men are wrong, all the women are correct and proper, none of the women characters need a man, all of the men need a woman to tell them what to do, and the male hero from the past is now a bozo that can only redeem himself by dying and getting out of the way).

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