Tag Archives: rating

movies

Top Movie Lists

Our list of highly recommended movies (very good or better) has grown to almost 500, and we’ve listed an additional 500+ movies that are better than just plain good. Of course, that’s just our opinion, but if you happen to agree with our chief critic, Rusty the Prospector, you’re in luck! Rusty’s 2-digit ratings are now displayed on thousands of movie info pages.

Just for kicks, and to make Movie-Mine’s lists more manageable, we’ve added sub-lists broken down both by decade and by genre. These sub-lists provide a quick, concise view with optional thumbnails and titles linking directly to the corresponding detail pages. To spice things up, each sub-list page has a carousel of relevant movie images, newly selected every day.

Whether or not you’re interested in Rusty’s recommendations, you may find our new resource page helpful: A List of Top Movie Lists. This page includes links to many notable top movie lists from highly respected sources on a number of reputable sites. These references are organized into three major sections:

Since this is a rather large collection of links, we’ve provided some handy navigational mechanisms to aid perusal of the list. Have fun!

movies

Movie-Mine extends its reach by tapping into the semantic web

Movie-Mine has undergone another round of significant enhancements, both in its search capability and its coverage of a large number of movies. Our title lookup facility now supports even faster “fuzzy” searching, employing Google’s recently released Knowlege Graph tools. Also we’ve substantially increased Movie-Mine’s scope with more film details, more titles, and more current information by incorporating content from Wikidata. What this means is that with minimum keystrokes and clicks, Movie-Mine immediately delivers a bunch of helpful information about any of hundreds of thousands of movies, without subjecting you to a deluge of advertising.

If you want to check out a particlar movie, the most efficient procedure is to start with a Movie-Mine title lookup. This quickly provides you with information that may be sufficient to make an immediate viewing decision. It also provides you with links to get more about that movie from many other reputable sites. Of course, most movie sites offer some sort of basic lookup and access to movie data, but not as fast and “fat-free” as Movie-Mine, and not with as egalitarian an attitude about linking to other good sites.

What really sets Movie-Mine apart, though, is its unique ability to attach your own private annotations to each movie. This enables you to transform movie selection into a gradual, incremental process. Instead of painfully going over the same ground again and again, you can come back to a viewing candidate and pick up from where you last left off, using your previous notes as a reminder. In this way, Movie-Mine isn’t just another movie site – it’s the logical starting point for using all of the best movie sites.

movies

a new tool for quick movie lookups across multiple sites

Movie-Mine - discover hidden gems!

When deciding whether to watch a movie, it helps to consider ratings and reviews from multiple sources, but this can be time-consuming. Film sites often have search facilities and movie info pages with links to selected reviews. However, presumably for competitive reasons, the best “meta-review” sites seldom link to each other. This makes it slower than it should be to search across many sites at once. That’s why I’ve created Movie-Mine, a meta-meta-search tool. It has a fast, incremental search that finds partial movie titles with minimal typing.

After you select an entry for a suggested matching title, Movie-Mine displays a page of basic movie information, including links to related pages on the most important film sites. For those sites to which a direct link is not yet known, Movie-Mine provides an appropriate Google site search, as indicated by a dashed border around the link. Links with a solid border should lead directly to the desired page on that site, without the need to go through an intermediate Google site search.

In some cases, most notably for links to Metacritic, the expected page may not be found. (These errors might be due to Metacritic’s having changed their page naming conventions.) Please feel free to report any erroneous links, so we can do our best to fix them. In the meantime, note that IMDb movie pages generally display summary Metacritic information, when available.

movies

deciphering IMDb and Netflix average user ratings

Both Netflix and IMDb obtain user ratings on a whole number scale; Netflix users score movies on a 1-5 scale, while IMDb users grade on a 1-10 scale. So you might naively conclude that, aside from the degree of uncertainty, a Netflix average user score of 3.7 is equivalent to an IMDb rating of 7.4 – but that would be wrong! Use this JavaScript-based movie rating conversion form to calculate the equivalent rating of either type to a score on a 1-99 scale.

movies

comparing movie reviews

Film review sites use a variety of different rating systems, making it somewhat difficult to compare assessments from many independent sources. Which is the better score, 4 out of 5 stars from a site that only uses whole stars, or 3 out of 4 stars from a site that uses half-stars? (You might be surprised at the answer!) To help answer such vexing questions, I’ve created a comparison of movie rating systems, with conversion tables covering the most commonly used rating schemes.

movies

summary of the best movie information and review sites

Movies are a great source of entertainment, but choosing the next movie to watch can be challenging. You don’t want to waste your time watching a disappointing movie. On the other hand, you can’t afford to spend too much time making a choice. The problem isn’t due to a lack of information, but an over-abundance. To help navigate more efficiently through the maze of movie information that’s available online, I’ve put together a compact summary of essential movie resources, including links to the most useful pages on those sites. If you’re looking for ideas about which movies to see, beyond what’s currently playing in theaters, this should be a pretty good starting point.