There are the National Board of Review Awards, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Los Angeles Film Critics Awards, the Producers Guild Awards and the British Film Institute Awards.
Oh, and the Oscars, too.
There’s no shortage of critics circles, guilds and groups that doll out awards this time of year. But there is an arguably more efficient way of deciding the best movies of the year.
The Web sites RottenTomatoes.com and MetaCritic.com are aggregators of critical opinion. They each cull reviews from around the country and average out the critiques.
Neither system is perfect. RottenTomatoes relies on determining whether a review is simply favorable or not (there can be a lot of gray area in between), and MetaCritic assigns a number on a scale of 100 (again, not all reviews work in a number system).
But if you want the broad critical consensus, it’s difficult to do better than these sites.
This week, Rotten Tomatoes announced their awards: the Golden Tomatoes. They split their best picture honor into two categories: best-reviewed wide-release movie and best-reviewed limited-release movie.
“WALL-E” won the Golden Tomato for wide-release with a “Tomatometer” score of 96 percent. In 10 years of the Golden Tomatoes, a Pixar film has topped wide-release movies five times; the other Pixar movies to do so: “Toy Story 2,” ”Finding Nemo,” ”The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille.”
The documentary “Man on Wire,” which recalls Philippe Petit’s tightrope feat between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, won the limited release Golden Tomato. It scored a perfect score on the Tomatometer, meaning that there were no unfavorable reviews from the surveyed critics.
The site also breaks down the best-reviewed films by genre. For the results, see: www.rottentomatoes.com/guides/rtawards.
Both “WALL-E” and “Man on Wire” were among the top four films as measured by MetaCritic. “WALL-E” and the French classroom drama “The Class” tied with a top score of 93. Tied for second were “Man on Wire” and the animated Israeli war film “Waltz with Bashir.”
The big winner at the Golden Globes, “Slumdog Millionaire,” followed as the fifth-best reviewed film, as computed by MetaCritic.
One could argue that these mathematically derived aggregators are a more true reflection of the best movies of the year. They are, after all devoid of influence from Oscar ad campaigns or celebrity shmoozing.
Some critics haven’t been such fans of the aggregators, though, which emphasize consensus over individual experience.
Matt Atchity, editor-in-chief of Rotten Tomatoes, said his site can lead readers to a critic they might not read in their hometown newspaper, but who’s more in line with one’s taste.
“I hope that Rotten Tomatoes is still a champion of film criticism,” said Atchity. “I still think film criticism is very important.”
House Calls Via TV and Streamers: A Rundown of The Season’s Doctor Dramas
No matter your ailment, there are plenty of TV doctors waiting to treat you right now on a selection of channels and streamers.
Whether it's Noah Wyle putting on his stethoscope for the first time since "ER," Morris Chestnut graduating to head doctor, Molly Parker making her debut in scrubs or Joshua Jackson trading death for life on a luxury cruise, new American hospital dramas have something for everyone.
There's also an outsider trying to make a difference in "Berlin ER," as Haley Louise Jones plays the new boss of a struggling German hospital's emergency department. The show's doors slide open to patients Wednesday on Apple TV+.
These shows all contain the DNA of classic hospital dramas โ and this guide will help you get the TV treatment you need.
"Berlin ER"
Dr. Suzanna "Zanna" Parker has been sent to run the Krank, which is only just being held together by hardened โ and authority-resistant โ medical staff and supplies from a sex shop. The result is an unflinching drama set in an underfunded, underappreciated and understaffed emergency department, where the staff is as traumatized as the patients, but hide it much better.
From former real-life ER doc Samuel Jefferson and also starring Slavko Popadiฤ, ลafak ลengรผl, Aram Tafreshian and Samirah Breuer, the German-language show is not for the faint of heart.
Jones says she eventually got used to the blood and gore on the set.
"It's gruesome in the beginning, highly unnerving. And then at some point, it's just the most normal thing in the world," she explains. "That's flesh. That's the rest of someone's leg, you know, let's just move on and have coffee or whatever."
As it's set in the German clubbing capital, the whole city... Read More