I use Rotten Tomatoes as an advisory tool. Some movies I’m going to see regardless of the critics because of the filmmaker, the star(s), etc. Others, I will look at the score, read the description and sample some of the reviews to decide if it is something I want to see. I never go solely by the score, even if it is below 50% fresh.
I don’t really pay much attention to the user reviews. Too many are supplied by people who haven’t seen the film or have an axe to grind. Plus, I simply don’t trust anonymous sources of information on the internet. IMDB is particularly subject to this, since they don’t have any critics reviews to balance the anonymous strangers.
I used to use Metacritic as well. They were a bit stricter with there criteria for positive reviews than RT and, back in the day, were more comprehensive in including independent and foreign films. But a couple of years ago, Metacritic started to not list as many independent/foreign films. Not just later appearance of scores, but not having films in release in their database at all. I finally gave up on Metacritic because the smaller films are the ones where scores and the ability to read multiple reviews are the most valuable.
I don’t go to all that many movies, and really at this point, most of them are review-proof. For the ones that look good from trailers, etc, or are the latest part of a franchise I like (cough Mission Impossible) I’m just gonna see them and make my own opinion.
As for RT, my old college roommate used to say “the masses are asses”, and that surely applies to RT and IMDB reviews.
I don’t care about review ratings so much, I am more interested in the description of the experience, which will tell me if the content is something I might like. A mediocre-rated review may nonetheless describe a movie that sounds like my thing, while a top-rated one might (very often, in fact) describe something I don’t care for.
Personally, I find the IMDB score to be more interpretable.
If a move is below about 6.5 then it’s a bad movie. If it’s above 8.2 then it’s some movie that’s caught up in the zeitgeist of movie snobbery or nerd-core. Movies in the 7 range are the good movies for normal people. TV shows rank a bit higher with the normal range being something more like 7.8 to 8.5 or something.
With Rotten Tomatoes, it’s far too easy to see movies that are effectively the same level of quality, humor, artistry, etc. landing in wildly different locations on the scale. The amount of connection to the underlying quality of the film doesn’t seem to matter so much as whether it tickled just the right person, just the right way, and otherwise it’s trash.
This is the only site I occasionally check since I don’t watch TV/movies very often. I really used to like when they had an interactive forum. I got so much out of that feature.
I will often read the reviews after I watch something. Some people can be very descriptive in their commentary.
Each week on Wednesday evening, I use Fandango to see what’s playing this weekend in or near my zip code. I put the new entries that interest me in an excel sheet I keep, delete the ones in the list that are no longer playing, and then order the list according to which ones I want to see the most.
I use RT to see what’s opening and click into the ones that I haven’t heard of and read the summary and some of the reviews. Since I don’t have time to see more than 2-3 in a weekend, I may revisit and do a deeper dive into some of the list in ordering it. Sometimes I use the scores as tiebreakers or as reasons to drop a marginally interesting film. Takes about 20 minutes.
Here is this week’s ordered list (if you wonder why you don’t see the big mainstream movies on the list, it’s either because I saw them already or I decided they didn’t make the list).