Movie Reviews and ratings

The Boston Globe's movie critic, Ty Burr, has written an interesting column about that necessary evil of the movie reviewer; the star rating system.

It's an interesting perspective on the limitations and miss-uses of the system. He also mentions a movie review site that's takes a different tack; Movie Review Intelligence attempts to break down reviews from different people:
The brainchild of media researcher David Gross, the site collects all the major reviews and ratings for a movie and slices them into infinite pieces of pie. MRI’s page for “Robin Hood,’’ for instance, assigns an aggregate rating (55.1 percent out of 100 possible points overall), then breaks that number down among Broad National Press (56.2 percent), Local Newspapers (60.7 percent), Alternative/Indie (63.9 percent), Highbrow Press (35.0 percent), Movie Industry (43.5 percent), and major, semi-major, and mini-major urban markets.
Even that method of rating doesn't fully meet Burr's requirements, and he makes a compelling - if rather futile - case for doing away with ratings altogether.

The Boston Globe: Star wars

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