Movies

How movies are rated

Movies are rated by a set of 10 criteria:

• Story - Is the story engaging and entertaining?
• Originality - How original is the story or approach?
• Cinematography - How innovative, beautiful, or approriate is the camera work and presentation?
• Actors - Was the casting done well, or are there a lot of good actors cast?
• Acting - How did the actors perform in their roles?
• Depth of characters - Did the characters entice exploring their histories or backgrounds?
• Setting - Was the setting appropriate or presented well?
• Pacing - Did the story move along in a fashion that is unnoticeable?
• Design - Was the aesthetic of the movie appropriate and/or pleasing?
• Extra - Personal extra preference

My rating is the average of the criteria above, scaled to 100. Averaging (rather than summing) keeps it on the same 0–100 scale even as criteria are added or refined over time.

How the score is built

The percentage you see is my rating plus two bonuses that can only ever add points, so nothing I love gets dragged down:

• An acclaim bonus for movies the public also loved, based on an average of the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes critics and users scores. It rewards widely acclaimed films, but a guilty pleasure the critics panned is never penalized for it
• An endurance bonus for older movies that still hold up — age counts only in proportion to how highly the movie scores, so a dated movie I rated poorly gains little

That sum is the score: it is the number on every badge, the number that orders this list, and the number on the movie’s own page — one figure doing all three jobs. Every movie page shows the arithmetic behind its score, so you can see exactly which bonuses it earned. The total is capped at 100, which only two movies actually reach.