Every review on my blog has at least four basic elements: a pitch, a review, a “Why see it at the cinema” and, most crucially, a score, because it is the right of every rational person to needlessly rank everything in life into some kind of order. As I update my movie lists on the Internet Movie Database, which uses an effective rating of between 1 and 10, I rate any movies I review here on a 1 to 10 scale. You might prefer a star rating of one to five stars, so I have aligned my scores to a star rating for clarity. This can be fairly quickly summed up as:
10 – Outstanding (should be seen more than once on the big screen, badger your friends ad nauseam to go and see it even if it’s not really their thing, has no real weak points worth mentioning) FIVE STARS
9 – Excellent (buy on Blu-ray as soon as released, thoroughly enjoyable but falling just short of true glory, definitely worth a post-pub discussion) HIGH FOUR STARS
8 – Very Good (buy on Blu-ray when you can afford it, but definitely worth a trip out to the cinema) FOUR STARS
7 – Good (buy on DVD (but don’t go mad), still justifies a trip to the cinema) HIGH THREE STARS
6 – Moderate (maybe rent before you buy, see it if there’s nothing else on unless there’s a 10/10 you could maybe see again?) THREE STARS
5 – Average (watch on TV if it’s on and you haven’t seen it before, but think twice before handing over hard-earned cash at the cinema) LOW THREE STARS
4 – Fair (watch on TV if there’s really nothing else on, but only if you can’t be arsed to find the remote or do something else more constructive) HIGH TWO STARS
3 – Poor (give it a miss, not worth the time and effort, think twice even if someone gives you a free ticket) LOW TWO STARS
2 – Very Poor (actively avoid, go home if there’s nothing else on at the cinema, if you have friends going to see it allow them to feel the pain without inflicting it on yourself) HIGH ONE STAR
1 – Awful (start an internet campaign to bring the nature of the sheer despair induced to a wide audience, possibly campaign with placards outside the cinema to help people avoid making such an unfortunate life choice, question the very meaning of existence) LOW ONE STAR
You can find the ratings for everything I’ve seen in a cinema here in the last five years:
One thing to be clear on here, though, there will be many more 10s than 1s. This is not because I believe there are many more good films made, but because the philosophy which I’m attempting to spread hopefully guides me to more of the good ones than the bad ones (except when I can’t help myself and go see a horror movie with Elisha Cuthbert in, and it turns out to be just as offensively bad as I’d expected). So hopefully you can now easily compare your own thoughts to mine. Sorted.
