Critisc Round Up

"Prvi" agregator filmskih kritika (à la Rotten Tomatoes ili Metacritic, ili u muzici - Any Decent Music) koji se vodi mjerilom vrijednosti a ne popularnosti. Domaći izraz: za ljubitelje "umjetničkog filma".

criticsroundup.com/



Critics Round Up is the first movie review aggregator to select critics and publications based on merit instead of popularity. Merit, on this site, is defined as generally being friendly to arthouse and international cinema and resisting stagnant ways of thinking.

This site has two main goals:

Goal #1

To provide an alternative to the aggregated numbers of more popular sites. Rotten Tomatoes is good for people who want to see the highest number of critics included, but standards need to be applied. Not everyone should be counted. Metacritic works for people who are mainly interested in well-known publications, but they ignore many of the best sources for film criticism because they aren’t as recognizable (no MUBI, no Cinema Scope, no more J. Hoberman since he left the Village Voice). My idea was to synthesize the approaches of these sites: to filter out the majority of the online discourse, but also to be plugged in enough to include smaller sites that have valuable things to say.
I should give credit where it’s due. The idea of focusing on high-minded critics was mostly inspired by my love of David Hudson’s Daily. I don’t know David, but he has superb taste in film criticism. I’m basically taking many of the critics he aggregates and applying a 100-point scale to their reviews to try to challenge the scores and ratings of Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

Goal #2

To serve as a link archive. Even if you dislike seeing movies and reviews reduced to a number on a 100-point scale, I hope that, if you’re a discerning cinephile, you would at least find the link archive aspect useful. The archive of links is not where I’d like it to be at the moment. I have 8 months worth of links I’ve been gathering that will take some time to get added to the site. A year from now, by May 2014, the archive will be a glorious treasure trove of links. And every year that passes, the archives will get much richer. So please be patient as the site continues to form. We’ll also make an effort to aggregate old movie reviews that are only available in print. I have a few books by James Agee, Manny Farber and others that will be included on the site. Our coverage of film festivals will be better than any other aggregator site. We’ll do a lot of aggregating for Cannes, TIFF, NYFF, Berlinale, Venice and ND/NF. The other aggregators don’t really cover those festivals, but we will.

Which Movies Get Aggregated

Because aggregating and adding movie information is time-consuming, I have to be selective about which movies are added to the site. Currently, there are around 20 movies that receive a commercial release in NYC every week. CRU will aggregate only the ones that are well-reviewed or hold interest to cinephiles for some other reason (e.g. if it’s by a celebrated director). Most of those new releases get lukewarm-to-negative reviews and are quickly forgotten anyhow, so I don’t think people will be disappointed that they’re not on this site. As a general rule, new reviews of old movies usually get aggregated here. If a critic feels a movie is worth writing about many years after it was first released, it probably deserves attention, even if it’s a negative review.

Explanation of the 100-Point Scale

I would expect that most cinephiles understand how a 100-point scale works by now, but I should clarify since that’s not true for everybody. The higher a movie or critic’s review lands on the 100-point scale, the more positive the reaction is. I’m not giving color-coded or pictographic indications of how positive or negative each review is, but to sum it up quickly, positive reviews are generally 61 and up.

Other Sections

The Archive is an index of pages that are pretty much satisfactory and complete. The blog updates every Thursday evening with mentions of pages added and updated for the site. For more immediate updates, you can follow Critics Round Up on Twitter.