George Mason Web News

SPRING 2026

Arts

Rating is Overrated – A Rant on Movie Scores

Imagine for a moment, you just saw a new movie in the cinema. You take the first steps out of that darkened auditorium and your friend asks you “What would you rate it out of ten?”. With some thought you apply a hard numerical value to the 90+ minutes of story on celluloid that you just watched. In my humble opinion, this is the death of a cinematic experience. It limits the complexities of what makes up a movie to a scale that only accounts for a blanket good/bad ranking. Additionally, there is a high chance that you completely avoided certain movies that you personally would have loved just because it had a bad critic score on some vapid movie review website. Their is immense joy in taking a chance on something completely random. Some of the most special cinematic experiences are when you discover a bold imaginative film that was buried under a mounted of “five-out-of-ten” reviews. One man’s The Room is another man’s Citizen Cane.