As a person who paid a lot of money to watch movies in college, I go to IMDb a lot. Yet in the several decades I’ve used it, I’ve never gone there to read user reviews unless it’s to make fun of them. That’s because IMDb reviews as an aggregate are reliably banal and awful. This wrongness has led me to form an extremely rough rule of thumb: Most good feature length movies that take any kind of serious risk, anything that isn’t immediately crowd-pleasing and thus intellectually engaging, tend to land in the zone of 6.3 to 7.6 out of 10.
I’m not saying that every movie in that zone is challenging or engaging, that would be silly, and sometimes a movie is simply middling. Nor am I saying that challenging movies don’t escape the range. But you would be shocked how often well-regarded filmmakers wallow in that range. Kiyoshi Kurosawa, the director of Pulse (6.5/10) and Cure (7.5) basically lives there. David Cronenberg’s highest rated movie is 7.6 with The Fly but the majority languish well under 7.0. John Carpenter has a few that break containment (Halloween and The Thing, 7.7 and 8.2 respectively), but the remainder languish at 7.3 or worse. Every Todd Haynes feature is 7.6 and under. No Dario Argento movie, including Suspiria, cracks 7.3. Pasolini? Tops out at 7.6. Tsai Ming-liang is 7.5. Apichatpong Weerasethakul: 7.3. John Waters unsurprisingly caps out at 7.2, but to be honest I think he’d love that if you told him.
This theory was inspired by Jonathan Glazer’s movie Birth. Birth is a downright bizarre and abrasive movie that makes strong choices. It’s a haunting psychological drama about Nicole Kidman being convinced by a child that he’s the reincarnation of her husband who died of a heart attack in Central Park. Criterion just announced a 4k Blu-ray of it. There is simply no movie like it, and it is currently sitting at 6.3 on IMDb. Under The Skin, Glazer’s harrowing sci-fi adaptation about an alien luring Scottish men to its lair in a Scarlett Johansson skin suit, also stands at 6.3. In fact, Sexy Beast and The Zone of Interest, by far Glazer’s most critically acclaimed works, top out at 7.3.
Part of this is that IMDb uses a 10 star system, which is wrong as hell and conceptually murky. I don’t think numerical ratings matter, but to the extent that they do, movies traditionally have existed on a 4-5 star/bucket of popcorn range, or occasionally two guys on TV giving thumbs up. It is harder to get consensus on what a ten scale means than a five scale, and simply multiplying a five scale by two does not convey comparable ideas. Three stars out of five does not read the same as 6/10 stars even if they are fractionally identical. Ten stars is conceptually absurd.
Other sites work differently. Rotten Tomatoes works on a percentage system that, while often wrong, importantly separates critics and random dipshits, and those two scales can be used as a fairly solid context-dependent data point. It also lets you sort those results by date, thus giving you a snapshot about who was wrong as hell about a movie when it came out, like Ebert giving Starship Troopers a 2/4. Letterboxd is full of trolls and annoying film freaks, but at the very least it does a better job at showing you the spread of reviews than IMDb does, and makes it easier to get a sense of the person writing the review. And even when Letterboxd and IMDb are in the same ballpark rating wise, Letterboxd tends to have consistently better taste.
The second problem is that everyone who posts on IMDb is an annoying jackass. If you willingly set up an IMDb account to weigh in, you tend to bring a combination of boring taste and unearned pretension. The reviews are often unreadable. It is a forum made up of guys who would have, in an earlier time, pathed around video rental stores like a guard in Metal Gear Solid despite not working there, waiting for strangers to pick up DVDs in their vision cones so they could announce unprompted what they thought about the movie. Video stores are dead now and the internet exists, and IMDb has given these guys a smoking hole to shout into.
IMDb ratings of interesting movies should be treated like Trip Advisor reviews of any ethnic restaurant. The same core impulse that makes random, boring people wander into a killer Indonesian spot and post something ignorant because they don’t recognize anything is a cousin to the impulse to write a review where they call something “too film school.”
Obviously, interesting movies and directors escape this range often, but much of the time they tend to be crowd pleasing or so culturally lauded that a rating isn’t really telling you a whole lot. Of course Kurosawa, Wilder, and Kubrick are there, they’re unimpeachably good at making movies. I was pleased to see Grave of the Firelies (8.6), Seppuku (8.6), and Come and See (8.3) represented, but maybe brutally depressing movies about the senselessness of war and violence do well there. Or maybe the key is to make a saccharine movie that contains some variation on the word “beauty,” as is the case with American Beauty (8.3) and Life Is Beautiful (8.6) and A Beautiful Mind (8.2).
On paper I should not care about arbitrary number ratings as much as I do, and if they nuked that part of the website tomorrow I would not bat an eye. Taste is capricious and arbitrary, and you learn what you like by engaging with criticism, following people who share your taste, and engaging with the disparity of reactions. But the reason I’m so focused on IMDb is because it appears first next to Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd with every single Google search result. It’s the first thing I see when I watch a movie on Jellyfin, and is the default rating on Amazon which owns IMDb (conspicuously, Apple TV only shows ratings from Rotten Tomatoes.) I would not have an issue if the ratings breakdown was more prominently displayed up front the way Letterboxd does by default (you have to click through and scroll way down to see it on IMDb). Instead I am confronted with this weird, useless number every time I look up a movie, and so this is the rough guideline I have made to make that data useful somehow.
I’m going to rattle off a bunch of movies that I personally enjoy a lot, picked scattershot and capriciously. Many of you may dislike them and will likely say “oh that makes sense.” I think at least a few should make you go “what the hell,” particularly when you understand that all of them fare worse than Crash (7.7), La La Land (8.0), Green Book (8.2), and Detroit: Become Human (9.1).
- Event Horizon 6.6
- Possession 7.2
- Blade 7.1
- The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) 7.4
- The Mummy [1999] 7.1
- They Live 7.2
- Batman (1989) 7.5
- Batman Returns 7.1
- The Duellists 7.4
- Robocop 7.6
- Teorema 7.0
- Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer 7.4
- Patlabor 2: The Movie 7.5
- Rush Hour 7.0
- The Stairway To A Distant Past 6.8
- Hellraiser 6.9
- Hellraiser 2 6.4
- In The Mouth Of Madness 7.1
- The Fifth Element 7.6
- Road House 6.3
- The Last Boy Scout 7.0
- Near Dark 6.9
- Friday 7.2
- Millennium Mambo 7.0
- The Fog 6.9
- Hot Rod 6.7
- Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story 6.8
- Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping 6.7
- Wet Hot American Summer 6.5
- Mars Attacks 6.4
- Coming to America 7.1
- Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives 6.7
- Cemetery of Splendor 6.8
- Drop Dead Gorgeous 6.7
- Heathers 7.1
- Bring It On 6.2
- Clueless 6.9
- Set It Off 6.9
- Thief 7.4
- The Craft 6.5
- Audition 7.1
- Eraserhead 7.2
- Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me 7.3 (Note: Twin Peaks itself is 8.7 and The Return is 8.5)
- Safe 7.1
- Wild At Heart 7.2
- Re-Animator 7.1
- Layer Cake 7.2
- Dracula (1931) 7.3
- Videodrome 7.2
- Mad Max 6.8
- Johnny Guitar 7.6
- Green Room 7.0
- The Blob (1988) 6.7
- The Lighthouse 7.4
- Ring (1998) 7.2
- The Ring (2002) 7.1
- Grey Gardens 7.5
- Altered States 6.9
- Mean Streets 7.2
- Inland Empire 6.8
- King of New York 6.9
- To Live And Die In L.A. 7.3
- Repo Man 6.8
- The Wicker Man (1975) 7.5
- Manhunter 7.2
- Burn After Reading 7.0
- A Serious Man 7.0
- Hail, Caesar! 6.3
- From Beyond 6.6
- The Exorcist III 6.5
- Bullitt 7.5
- Gremlins 2: The New Batch 6.5
- Small Soldiers 6.3
- Blow Up 7.4
- Picnic At Hanging Rock 7.4
- Dead Ringers 7.2
- Scanners 6.7
- eXistenZ 6.8
- Death Becomes Her 6.7
- The Last Temptation of Christ 7.5
- The Witches 6.8
- The Witches of Eastwick 6.6
- The Cell 6.4
- Hackers 6.2
- Duel [1971] 7.6
- Pink Flamingos 6.0
- Cruising 6.5
- Escape From Precinct 13 7.3
- Altered States 6.9
- The Love Witch 6.2
- Daisies 7.2
- A Better Tomorrow 7.4
- Predator 2 6.3
- Shin Godzilla 6.8
- The Cable Guy 6.1
- Speed Racer 6.1
- The Lair Of The White Worm 6.1
- The Beguiled [1971] 7.2
- Conan The Barbarian 6.9
- Mad God 6.8
- Zama 6.9
- Beau Travail 7.3
- Michael Clayton 7.2
- Belly 6.2
- Master And Commander: The Far Side of the World 7.5
