objective Criticker: It Tells You If You'll Like a Movie

[TychoCelchuuu]

Criticker is probably one of my favorite websites in the entire world. You rate a bunch of movies and then it calculates what rating you'd give to movies you haven't seen by finding people whose tastes are similar to yours and using their rankings to estimate your ranking. I've rated 1048 movies and by this point it's eerily accurate, and it has been for a while. You can customize the numbers that you use, but I use a 1-100 ranking system, and it's rarely more than about 5 points off from what I actually rank a film once I've seen it. It's super helpful in terms of finding new stuff to watch, deciding what to add to my Netflix queue, etc.

 

That's really just the beginning, though. There's a bunch of other cool stuff it can do. So for instance I can search through the database, find all the movies from the 1950s that I haven't seen, rank them according to how much I'll probably enjoy them, filter them by genre, etc. I can see a list of every director who I've seen more than 3 movies by, or more than 4 movies by, or more than 5 movies by, or whatever, and see them all ranked according to how much I enjoyed their movies. I can search through my own rankings and find my favorite movies released in 1993 or my favorite romance movies or my favorite actin movies from the 80s or anything like that.

 

It has lots of user created lists, too, so for instance here are all the lists I've made:

 

 

Notice how I can see that I've seen 31 of the 91 films in the "They Shoot Pictures Neo-Noir" list, 4 of Rian Johnson's top 10 Criterion Collection films, ZERO of Steve Buscemi's top 10 Criterion Collection films, etc. All these lists are viewable by everyone, so in addition to all these lists there are plenty of lists by other users that I keep my eye on, like a list of every film by a female director or Martin Scorcese's 85 films you need to see to know anything about movies.

 

You can show your profile to other people, so that they can for instance see all your rankings.

 

Anyways, it's pretty cool. Ranking stuff is fairly easy, once you get a ranking system you like: the default is 1-100 I think, but you can change it to basically anything, like 1-5, by going to your profile, scrolling to near the bottom, and clicking "Manually control the colors & quips applied to your rankings with this tool."

[Chris]

This is pretty great. Thanks for the rec!

[Problem Machine]

I like most movies okay and it's normalizing my rankings. Even if I haven't given many ranks below 70, that doesn't mean I think 70 is bad!

I looked up The Life of David Gale just so I had something I could confidently give a near-zero score but it doesn't seem to have helped. Maybe I need to think of more shitty movies. Even movies I don't like much, like Avatar, usually still have something to recommend them, so it's hard for me to just totally pan them.

[TychoCelchuuu]

1 hour ago, Problem Machine said:

I like most movies okay and it's normalizing my rankings. Even if I haven't given many ranks below 70, that doesn't mean I think 70 is bad!

I think part of what's going on is that you like most movies okay so most rankings assume you'll like the movie okay. The ranking system shouldn't have a lower bound based on your rankings unless the people who rate things similar to you have a lower bound. It's calculating scores with the scores of people with similar taste to you, not something else, so there should be no problem with crummy movies getting crummy scores.

[SuperBiasedMan]

This is really cool, I've been playing with it a bunch. Definitely a good way to motivate me into watching immense backlog of things.

[Problem Machine]

Yeah I'm mostly just taking issue with the little text box underneath the ranking saying bad, terrible, okay, etc. That's probably also partially because their calibration movies tend to be extremely well known and popular, which skews it towards movies that I like. That said, a movie has to be pretty bad before I rate it under a 50, just because I think we're generally okay at making movies and it's rare for movies that actually get eyes on them to actually be below average.

[TychoCelchuuu]

16 minutes ago, Problem Machine said:

Yeah I'm mostly just taking issue with the little text box underneath the ranking saying bad, terrible, okay, etc. That's probably also partially because their calibration movies tend to be extremely well known and popular, which skews it towards movies that I like. That said, a movie has to be pretty bad before I rate it under a 50, just because I think we're generally okay at making movies and it's rare for movies that actually get eyes on them to actually be below average.

Ah, yes. You can change those quips and the numbers they're assigned to with the link near the bottom of your profile page.

[Problem Machine]

Nice! Only complaint now is that it wouldn't let me use "kinda like real bad" as a tier quip

[TychoCelchuuu]

That's pretty much everyone's #1 complaint with the site.

[Patrick R]

I used to log everything on Criticker but I never found the algorithm recommended me anything I hadn't heard of and wasn't already interested in. I use Letterboxd now and it suits my needs a lot better. I follow people whose taste I find interesting (including several critics and programmers for theaters like the Alamo Drafthouse), and I've discovered way more underseen and little known films that way.

 

It also works better for me as a film journal, as I've written a review for every film I've seen since early 2013 (1,346 reviews so far), and I prefer the emphasis on reviews rather than ratings because sometimes I even discover movies I like via people giving it a bad review, if their review seems to imply that I'd still like it. But maybe Criticker's design and algorithms have improved a bunch in the nearly 10 years since I used it.

[TychoCelchuuu]

In terms of recommendations, I use Criticker in four ways. First, if you just refresh the home page, it'll show you some interesting movies, including some super obscure stuff that I had never heard of and likely wouldn't have heard of. Second, the collections are super helpful - for instance, the They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? 250 essential noir films list is great for finding noir to watch. Third, the database serach search is great for finding (for instance) all the best sci-fi movies I haven't seen, or all the best movies from 1957 that I haven't seen, etc. Since those searches are so broad they find lots of obscure stuff. Finally, I use it to check out a movie I've found via other routes, like Netflix. If something on Netflix looks interesting but iffy I'll just type it into Criticker and see what it says. I used Letterboxd only very briefly so I can't really say how it compares.

[Patrick R]

Yeah, they definitely added features since I used it, then. Those are all also part of Letterboxd as well.

[Erkki]

I haven't tried Criticker, but I doubt I would move away from Letterboxd because:

 

• Started using it about a year ago - it was real buggy at first, but now it's a really smooth experience and I use it daily because I watch movies every day.
• From the description Criticker sounds like it's all about finding personal recommendations for you. Letterboxd is also about the social network, not just me personally. Although I'm mostly using it for personal watchlist/diary, I'm also checking out reviews by people in my network, such as Patrick, if I happen to be on the page of a movie others have seen.
• It's been pretty hopeless trying to get my friends on Letterboxd - a lot would just use Facebook as the only social network service, really. Not going try again with another service, I'd rather stick with one.
• I don't really lack film recommendations. My watchlist is almost 500 long, and people keep recommending me more when I speak to them about movies. I'm trying hard to trim it and watch movies from there. I haven't yet watched 72 movies from the Blu-Rays I've bought over the last couple of years. I have downloaded hundreds of movies I'd like to see and I think I've seen less than half of them. I'm also going to the cinema when there's something I think will be good, and I subscribe to Mubi, so I've a lot of movies to watch.

Now one thing that does sound interesting to me about the description of Criticker is the database search. Patrick, maybe I'm wrong, but AFAIK Letterboxd doesn't really have a comprehensive search where you can make up complex criteria? Rather it has some criteria of browsing movies and then you may be able to add a couple of additional filters to it. I wonder if I could easily import my Letterboxd data to Criticker, in that case I could give it a shot.

 

[Erkki]

Ok, I found a python script on GitHub that converts from Letterboxd exported ratings.csv to IMDb format, which can be imported to Criticker. Will give it a try.

[Patrick R]

The parameters are more complex on Criticker (I really wish Letterboxd would add country of origin as a data point). Part of that is that Letterboxd tries to maintain a really clean look, while Criticker is way more stripped down and text based.

[TychoCelchuuu]

One of my favorite things for Criticker is that for each movie you can see the score breakdown that shows you how much everyone liked it, which countries liked it the most, how much each gender liked it, and how much each age group liked it. It's cool seeing how some movies, like Clueless, have a fairly substantial difference in the average score between men and women (4.72 vs 5.35 in that case). It's also interesting to see how many movies have a higher average rating from men than women - Clueless is one of the few exceptions. It hammers home how man-centric a lot of our entertainment is.

[Ben X]

Are those scores out of ten? How the hell is Clueless getting scored so low by either gender?!

[TychoCelchuuu]

Those are the average tiers people sort things into, and yeah, it breaks it down into 10 tiers. I guess it's getting scored low by crazy people who don't know brilliance when they see it.

[Salacious Snake]

This site seems neat, but I'm having a hard time rating things. There are so many movies that I've seen, but I don't have strong feelings about one way or the other. I don't want to give them a middling score, because that feels mean!

[Cordeos]

1 hour ago, Salacious Snake said:

This site seems neat, but I'm having a hard time rating things. There are so many movies that I've seen, but I don't have strong feelings about one way or the other. I don't want to give them a middling score, because that feels mean!

My scale is based on how much i would be willing to watch it again 0-35 is "Never again" 36-55 is "Ok sure I guess" "56-75" "Yes" 76-100 "Hell yes!"

[SuperBiasedMan]

I'm mostly gauging on the vague category I put it in. Actively offensive/total trash is 1-40, would not rewatch, may regret watching is 40-60, good but not one I'd recommend/return to is 60-80 and then 80-100 is movies I actually like a lot.

[TychoCelchuuu]

The nice thing about the ratings is that you only need to make them as accurate as you want the predictions to be. No need to stress out as long as you're cool with somewhat vague predictions.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Yeah I make myself only spend a short period thinking about it. If I'm taking longer than a few seconds then I just skip the movie. In my case, they're not at all reviews just indications of my overall enjoyment of the movie. 

[dium]

In December I started logging and 'reviewing' every movie I watch on letterboxd, and I really like it. Everything I log is public, of course, but I use it more like a personal movie diary than a social media service – at least in part because I don't imagine anyone would be interested in reading my highly uneducated thoughts about film.

 

Forcing myself to form written opinions about what I watch feels good, and helps me better appreciate films in general. Or at least that's the illusion I'm getting.

 

The user-created lists are also a lot of fun, albeit often in a big time-wasting sort of way. 

 

Review-based algorithmic suggestions (which seems to be the big selling point of Criticker when compared to Letterboxd) doesn't really appeal to me. I've recently wanted to become more voracious with the movies I watch, not just in quantity but in diversity. And it seems to me that a suggestion algorithm based on what I already know I like would be counterproductive to that. Besides, the list of movies I want to watch is already huge and still growing – I don't need any help making it longer.

[TychoCelchuuu]

It's not an algorithm based on what you already know, it's an algorithm based on what other people similar to you think about the movie. It doesn't suggest you anything other than things it thinks you'll like. I don't know about Letterboxd's suggestions but I've gotten suggestions from Criticker that I would never have heard of otherwise, because it just randomly picks movies that it thinks you'd score high, rather than picking based on popularity or something. Like, there's no way I would ever have added "As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty" to my "to watch" list outside Criticker, I bet.