The Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews are a collection of all the movie reviews from major film critics and film reviews from magazines and newspapers. They keep track of hundreds of critics and newspapers to give you a balanced score.
How It Works
Rotten Tomatoes indexes film reviews into two categories, positive and negative. If it's a positive review it receives a "Fresh" rating; otherwise it's a "Rotten" rating. These ratings are compiled into a percentage of Fresh reviews. If the percentage of Fresh reviews is over 60 percent then it's good. Below 60 percent, not so good.
The Tomatometer for Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
The Tomatometer is the rating of positive reviews. There are a few categories that rate the movies. The first is the "T-meter Critics." These are a core set of official movie reviewers that are consistent and provide valid and useful feedback about a movie. These reviewers tend to be more honest than most, so don't expect them to like your favorite movie. The second tab is for the "Top Critics." Here you'll find more recognizable names from bigger sources like The Chicago Tribune and The New York Times. Lastly, there is the positive review score form the Rotten Tomatoes community. Basically, users like you.
Not Even the Fans
The scores tend to be pretty even, with the T-meter Critics often have a lower score. The good thing about Rotten Tomatoes is that not even huge fans of a certain film can rig the score. For instance, Twilight received a 43 percent from the T-meter critics, a 58 percent from the Top Critics and a 53 percent from the Rotten Tomatoes community. If you read some of the comments under the RT Community tab, you can tell that the fans who really liked the movie were trying to influence the score a little.
Comments
If you sign up for an account to write Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews, you can comment on just about anything. There are forums all over the site for every movie and actor/actresses so you'll be hard pressed to find nothing to do. You can also comment on each individual critic's review as well as reviews from the community.
Grading Systems
Most critics use some kind of star or scoring system based on five. Unfortunately, what one critic might view as a bad film at 2.5 out of 5 could be an okay film with positive comments at 2.5 out of 5. Rotten Tomatoes takes the critic's review style into account: a relaxed, low score review could get a "Fresh" rating even though the reviewer gave it a low score.
Where the Name Came From
The name Rotten Tomatoes might be easy for you to figure out. But if you need a little help, then here you go. Back in the glory day of performing, if there was a bad performance, then the audience would throw food at the actor or actress. This could be anything from apples to carrots to tomatoes. It was implied that if you partook in this activity, you thought the play for performance was "rotten."
Certified Fresh
Some of the better Rotten Tomatoes movie reviews can get a Certified Fresh logo, which means the movie is a must see. The percentage of positive reviews must be over 75 percent and Rotten Tomatoes must have at least 40 Tomatometer critic reviews to go off of. You can use this logo on your own website if you desire, but it must link to the Rotten Tomato website in some way, either to the movie review, the movie page, or the home page.
One Stop Shop
You can usually find around 50-150 movie reviews per movie to give you a fair opinion of the movie. It's always good to read the negative as well as the positive because not everybody will like everything, which is good because Rotten Tomatoes likes to keep things fair.
There are also video game reviews on the site that go by the same type of ratings.
