Top 5 Best Sites for Movie Reviews

When looking for movie reviews online, it can often be a frustrating experience if you don't have any sites that you regularly visit. Typing a movie's name and the word "review" into Google can yield results, but it's difficult to find consistent results and even more difficult to find useful ones. For every good review you find, you're also likely to find two or three half-baked blog posts that barely do anything more than rehash parts of a movie's plot or simply say: "It was good."

Sites do exist, however, that compile multiple reviews from both national and local critics. After compiling the reviews, the sites then run the scores through some sort of equation to give a picture of how positive (or negative) the reviews are for a movie in general. Not by any means an exhaustive list, here are the top five sites that one can visit that either compile movie reviews or feature a wealth of user generated reviews to sift through:

Rotten Tomatoes

Perhaps the most famous of all the movie review sites, Rotten Tomatoes is a site that takes reviews from a large number of national and regional movie critics and, based on the grade given by the critic and the overall tone of the review, the review is rated as either saying the movie is "fresh" or "rotten." After at least 5 reviews have been compiled by the site, the number of "fresh" and "rotten" scores given are averaged. If a movie has at least 60% "fresh" reviews, the movie itself is labeled as "fresh." If a movie has less than 60% "fresh" reviews, it is labeled as "rotten."

Rotten Tomatoes is certainly one of the largest and most widely used movie reviewing sites, yet it is not without its problems. It's a very simplistic rating system, sorting everything as "good" or "bad," leaving no room for a middle ground or degrees of "good" and "bad." For example, let's say a movie got 20 reviews, all of which gave it a 7/10. Chances are good that movie would have a 100% "fresh" rating. Now, let's say another movie got 20 reviews from the same sources, eighteen of which gave the movie a 10/10, and the other two gave it a 3/10. That movie would only have a 90% "fresh" rating, despite the fact that eighteen different critics judged it to be either better or more enjoyable than the first movie.

Metacritic

Metacritic doesn't compile the number of reviews that Rotten Tomatoes does (Wide release movies generally have between 20 and 35 reviews on Metacritic), but what it lacks in quantity it makes up for in quality. Not only does Metacritic compile only the top critical reviews for movies, it runs them through a special "weighted algorithm" to come up with a "Metascore," which ends up being a value between 1 and 100.

Unfortunately, Metacritic doesn't tell the general public exactly what this algorithm is, thus giving the Metascore an air of mystery that may turn people off. Fortunately, the color-coded grading scheme (green indicates scores above 60, yellow scores between 40 and 60, red for scores below 40) and the overall site layout are probably the most aesthetically pleasing and easy to follow of any of the review sites. Metacritic is also the only site on this list to also offer review compilations for TV shows, music and video games. So if you're interested in multiple (or all) of those subjects, then Metacritic can be your one-stop-shop for reviews.

MRQE

The Movie Review Query Engine (MRQE; pronounced "marquee") has a large number of reviews (like Rotten Tomatoes), but instead of assigning them with simple "good" and "bad" designations, MRQE instead provides a graph of the critics grades and provides the user with an arithmetic average of the review scores. MRQE offers more in the way of movie news and a wider range of scores than Metacritic, although its bland aesthetics may turn some off. Perhaps the best feature of MRQE is the ability to sort the critical reviews by different categories, including the score of the review or the critic's name.

Movie Review Intelligence

Movie Review Intelligence may just offer a simple statistic of what percentage of critics gave a movie a positive review, but it has perhaps the most detailed analysis of any of the sites on this list. Not only are the critical reviews broken down into categories, such as "broad national press" and "high-brow press," but the statistics are also broken down by how large the publications are. In addition, very detailed graphs are presented, showing where every individual review falls in terms of the review tone and the publication size. The youngest of the sites on this list, Movie Review Intelligence is also the most ambitious.

IMDB

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) does not provide a nicely gathered metric for reviews from professional critics. It is, however, one of the most useful sources when trying to gather information about a movie. In addition to cast and crew lists, IMDB also provides reviews generated by the site's users and lets it's users rate every movie they've seen on a 1-10 scale. Although this scale is often skewed (it really only represents the rating given by those people who use IMDB regularly), the expanded statistics can give a rough overview of what demographics will like a certain movie, such as what males age 45+ gave a certain movie or the breakdown between U.S. users and those using IMDB from other countries.

Sources:

www.rottentomatoes.com

www.metacritic.com

www.mrqe.com

www.moviereviewintelligence.com

www.imdb.com