Movie Criticism

Some of my friends say I don't like any movies. That's not true - it's just that I'm more discriminating, like professional critics and unlike most movie watchers. One might argue that this is the result of a selection bias and not necessarily refined movie tastes, but one has to contend with the fact that people who watch more movies tend to be less forgiving.

Jonathan Plucker and colleagues compared the ratings given to films by professional critics, "amateur critics", and undergrad students, and discovered a continuum of overlapping opinion with the experts being the harshest judges, followed by the amateur critics, while the students were the most generous.

A further finding to emerge was that undergrads who'd watched more films tended to provide harsher ratings, but these were still more generous on average than the amateur and professional critics.