Background

I love movies.

I love watching movies, talking about movies, and befriending people who love movies just like me. I was the president of my school's film discussion club, and I made two short films as my crew's production director. Naturally I got a lot of groups of people that talk about movies all the time. 

One thing that I don't like; there always is this one person who says "oh that movie is great for general audience" or "that movie'd be too difficult for general audience" when other people are excited about this good movie they're talking about.

Well then, how are critics and audience different exactly?

What are the good movies for audience and good movies for critics?

Hoping that this project will shut the rude person's mouth by proving that both critics and audience are able to enjoy both light and heavy films!

 About the Dataset

Let's first look into their rating behaviors. What are some similarities and differences between them?

• Interestingly, critics have a STRONG tendency to rate in integer. For example, about 44% of all critics' rating is 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7.0, or 8.0. On the other hand, while public audience also have tendency to give an integer number, a lot of them are comfortable using decimals.

• For both critics and audience, 6 out of 10 is the most common rating to give.

• While those two maps look alike, one finding is that critics are more open to watching, or giving high rating, of films from different regions of the world. You can see that there are more colored countries in <Movies that are loved by critics>.

• Above are maps of nations whose movies were rated 8 or higher by critics and public audience. While it might look like people favors movies from the U.S., Japan, and some European countries (United Kingdom, France, and Italy), that is not true. There are simply far more movies from those countries in the dataset  - see below.

Top Rated Films by Critics and Audience

• My definition of "Top Rated Films" is films that are rated 9.8 or higher out of 10.

• As I mentioned before, critics seem to enjoy films from diverse countries compared to public audience.

• It is interesting that a good amount of Hong Kong films are rated high by critics, although there are not many films from Hong Kong in the entire dataset. Cinema of Hong Kong is not only famous but also has a maniac fan base. As a former British colony, it had a greater degree of political and economic freedom than mainland China and Taiwan, and developed into a filmmaking hub for the Chinese-speaking world.

• While general audience rated Musical Films very well, none of the Musical movies are top-rated by the critics!

• Likewise, while general audience rated Fantasy Films very well, none of the Fantasy films are top-rated by the critics. Rather, critics gave high ratings for Documentary films.

• Drama genre is top-rated for both critics and audience, but it doesn't mean anything significant because there's a lot of drama genre films in the dataset.

Introducing films that are loved by both Critics and Audience

The Wall of the Dead (Le mur des morts) (2022)

Arnaud, a student remaining alone in Paris during the summer, is obsessed with the wall where the names of the Parisian soldiers who died in the 1914 war are engraved. He finds himself confronted by one of these soldiers, who invites him to step out of time and to bring comfort to his loved ones. 

Rembrandt's J'Accuse (2008)

An 'essayistic' documentary in which Greenaway's fierce criticism of today's visual literacy is argued by means of a forensic search of Rembrandt's Nightwatch. Greenway explains the background, the conspiracy, the murder and the motives of all its thirty-four painted characters who have conspired to kill for their combined self-advantage. Greenway leads us through Rembrandt's paintings into seventeenth-century Amsterdam. He paints a world that is democratic in principle, but is almost entirely ruled by twelve families. The notion exists of these regents as charitable and compassionate entities. However, reality was different.

 Closing

 Did you enjoy this post? 

I did! It was fun playing with the data and pulling interesting takeaways. Here're some of them:

• It is easier to get 9.8/10 or more from critics than from general audience.

• Critics have a strong tendency to rate in integer numbers. Only a few of them used decimals for their rating.

• Critics seem to enjoy films from diverse countries around the world, compared to general audience.

• General audience gave very high ratings for Musical and Fantasy genre films, while critics didn't.

One thing that I'd love to work on next time is to eliminate the potential biase that have occured because FilmTV is an Italian platform. It'd be fun to incorporate data from IMDb and other countries' film DB platforms to create analysis that reflects entire world's view.