Audiences mostly just want a good story. If the cinematography isn't great, if the shot composition is boring, the editing is janky, the audience may not care as much about those things, but a film critic will obsess over those kinds of problems.

A film critic can be so wowed by technical proficiency they don't notice it's in service of a poorly written story.

Also a film critic watches movies as their job. They're more likely to notice when a movie isn't all that original. They tend to want something that's unique to make their job of watching movies to be less boring. Someone in the audience doesn't care about that so much, mostly it's just important that the movie is entertaining. If the movie is sort of like a movie they didn't see, why would they care?

So I think a high critic score low audience score means the movie looks really good, but probably has a poorly written story. The critics went to film school, not writing school. For the converse, it's probably going to be fun and entertaining but isn't going to change my life.

[–] beefcat@beehaw.org 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Critics didn’t necessarily go to film school, but they see everything under the sun, so when a movie doesn’t do anything particularly new or is highly derivative without adding its own twist, it bores them. The person who goes to 3-5 movies a year doesn’t care, to them something derivative of 10 movies they haven’t seen is still new and fresh. This is in addition to the technical competency component you mentioned.

I watch a ton of movies so my tastes are more likely to align with those of a professional critic.

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