Quote Originally Posted by Bartmanhomer View Post
Being a fair critic. Sometimes I'm being too easy for giving bad movies a 3 out of 5 stars.
I don't read or write movie reviews, but I do grade a lot of student work, and one thing that helps me to be fair is to use a rubric. Instead of trying to give one overall score of "all of my feelings about how well you did at this assignment" I break it into specific categories like "accuracy" and "process shown clearly" and then grade and comment on each of those things. You can see this same idea if you ever look into the various competition threads in the D&D 3.x forum here - they score on specific things like Originality and Elegance.

I suggest thinking of 2-5 specific things you'd like to score movies based on (there are a LOT of different things you could choose, so pick ones that you'd like to pay attention to specifically rather than just copy a list from somewhere else blindly) and then rate movies on those things specifically. For example, here are some different things you could focus on:

  • How well the movie matched the expectations set by the trailer(s)
  • Pacing (did the movie seem too long, too short, or just right? Did it have parts that seemed to go on too long or not long enough?)
  • Humor (was the movie funny? was it supposed to be?)
  • Special effects
  • Realism within the story
  • Quality of costumes


There are many, many other things you could use as criteria as well, and obviously it does not make sense to use all of the criteria I listed for all movies. (Particularly, you probably don't want to spend a lot of time talking about special effects if you mostly like to go to romantic comedies and so on. Your criteria should make sense as things that someone else considering that movie might want to know about.)

This lets you use more thoughtful details in your review as well. Rather than just saying "such-and-such movie was kind of interesting but not the best movie I've seen this month", you can say things like "while such-and-such movie had well-made costumes and good use of humor, many of the scenes dragged on too long and the movie overall didn't seem to have enough going on to sustain its run time." This helps take your reviews out of the category of "a list of stuff that I do and do not like" and into the category of "providing information that other people can use to guess if they'll like it."