Check Out Google’s New Shortcut to Finding Out if a Movie Is Good Or Bad

Movie review aggregate sites are often blamed for ruining film criticism. They don’t just unfairly break down a bunch of opinions into one simple consensus, people say, but they also allow numerical ratings to be affixed to that consensus as if to assign it a be-all and end-all stamp of measurement determining a movie’s worth.

It can be argued that it’s not really the fault of the sites that do this so much as it’s the fault of people who visit the sites and only look at those scores. Still, the sites themselves can wind up an easy target, as in the case of a rant by writer and Stephen King offspring Joe Hill, who is angry about the Rotten Tomatoes aggregation of a couple new movies he likes. 

Well, for Hill and other critics of those review-melding sites, there’s another option available: Google. Gizmodo shared news that you can now just search Google for movie reviews and see a bunch of critics’ blurbs without visiting Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, both of which it appears to pull information from. You can also search the phrase, “Did [movie title] get bad reviews?” 

Going with this option doesn’t keep you from seeing the aggregate sites’ scores, however. Above the selected blurbs you’ll find a few items, which include any three of the following: the Rotten Tomatoes score, the Metacritic score, the star rating from RogerEbert.com (actually given by Roger Ebert for reviews written when he was alive) and the IMDb user rating.

The layout of Google’s aggregation is clean enough that it encourages you to read the blurbs in addition to noting the scores, though it may still give you less than a perfect picture of what the critics are saying since it only features a handful of voices. Obviously it’s always recommended to actually read the full reviews, the more the better.

Below are screen grabs of Google’s review results for this weekend’s notable new releases. As you can see, not all of temwork ahead of the movie’s opening (most old movies don’t have blurbs featured yet, either).