Best Movie Review Websites and Podcasts

Online movie ratings have become serious business. Hollywood generates something on the order of $10 billion annually at the U.S. box office, and online ratings aggregators may hold increasing sway over where that money goes. Sites like Rotten Tomatoes that aggregate movie reviews into one overall rating are being blamed for poor opening weekends. A single movie critic can’t make or break a film anymore, but maybe thousands of critics, professional and amateur together, can.

Several sites have built popular rating systems: Rotten Tomatoes,Metacritic and IMDb each have their own way of aggregating film reviews. And while the sites have different criteria for picking and combining reviews, they have all built systems with similar values: They use the full continuum of their ratings scale, try to maintain consistency, and attempt to limit deliberate interference in their ratings.

These rating systems aren’t perfect, but they’re sound enough to be useful.

Best Movie Review Website and Podcasts

HDHOX.com

hoxhd.com is the favorite movie review site for parents who would like to know exactly what kind of movie their child is seeing. It lays out the good, the bad, and the ugly. It gives an overview of the story before going into details on the positive and negative elements of the movie, including violence, language, and sexual content. (And they are not exclusively a movie review website–they also review TV shows, books, music, and games!)

While super helpful and revealing, it also gives a lot of spoilers and it can be a little bit too much information, especially if you are not a parent utilizing it to decide if your children can see the latest movie in theaters. I love this site for its detailed, well-written, thorough reviews. However, due to the many plot giveaways, I do not make use of it often. (Although I have a feeling that this will change after I have children!)