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Movies are taste-based and mood-based. Find an individual reviewer you agree with and follow them.
As for platforms? Rotten Tomatoes is like a probability scanner for whether or not I will enjoy a movie, not how much I enjoy it. After that? Nothing really gets close.
Find an individual reviewer you agree with and follow them.
Exactly! You can also find more than one to follow, and take note of which never match your tastes. For me, I will avoid any movie recommended by PBS's Patrick Stoner until/unless someone I trust tells me otherwise. I used to have two critics I particularly followed. One had the same taste in foreign film as I, and the other was ready to enjoy a stupid Hollywood rollick. Alas, I've lost track of the former and the latter is now at Slate doing a variety of stuff. The result is I pretty much stopped going to the theater.
I'm using IMDB because it's the biggest so it's got the most ratings, hance should be the most reliable. But then I only treat it as a general indicator, not source of truth.
You might wanna find a reviewer that shares your preferences and follow them.
Unfortunately it's owned by Amazon now so it inflates the ratings of their shows. But other than that it's still quite good like you said for getting an overview
IMDb balances out eventually
So many fake reviews to start with, but then ratings drop as real reviews come in.
If you're patiently sailing the high seas, it's reliable as fuck
That's some solid advice
What does reliable mean? You want the crowd's rating of the movie to align with yours, which is pretty much impossible. I find Letterboxd ratings to be more sensible than IMDB's, so that is what I use. But I also read a few positive and a few negative reviews to get a better idea.
There is a site called Flickmetrix which has advanced filters and also an average ratings (critics, metacritic, IMDB, Letterboxd). Maybe that would be helpful to you...
I find that rogerebert.com ’s reviews are pretty solid. I use that for a quick tool to decide if I want to watch something - I don’t think i’ve ever been disappointed by a film they rated 3.5-4 stars.
Rottentomatoes and imdb, but only if you sort by user rating (not critic), and only if you ignore the scores from every movie after like 2015.
What I do is go on the wiki page of the movie and check the Reception section. It will have a summary of ratings from various sources, then I can sort of infer if it’s something worth watching by “averaging” the ratings.