How to Choose a Film Using Both Scores
One score tells you what a group thought. Two scores, read together, tell you whether you are likely to agree with them. The idea behind Honest Cinema Score is simple: keep critic and audience opinion apart, then use the difference as a guide to your own taste. This guide turns that idea into a few practical rules.
Start with the combination, not the number
For each film, look at where the two scores fall relative to each other and to the middle of the scale. There are four basic situations.
Both high
Critics and audiences agree that the film is good. This is the safest pick. If you have no strong preference, choose a film from this group, especially when the scores are backed by many votes and reviews.
Critics high, audience lower
The film is probably ambitious, demanding or different from its marketing. If you like challenging cinema, slow pacing or unconventional endings, this is where you will find your favorites. If you want an easy evening, skip it. Check CinemaScore if one exists: a poor grade suggests a mismatch with the promise, not a bad film.
Audience high, critics lower
The film probably delivers pleasure, fun or spectacle without craft that impresses critics. For a group movie night, this combination is often a better bet than a critical darling. It is also where fans of a genre or franchise will be best served.
Both low
Both groups found it disappointing. Only watch it if something specific draws you to it, such as an actor, a director or curiosity.
Check the size of the sample
A score based on only a few reviews is unreliable. Early in a film's run, numbers swing sharply as more votes arrive. Look at how many sources contribute to each side, which our coverage line shows, and treat a result built on one or two sources as provisional. When you can, wait a week.
Calibrate against films you know
The most useful trick is personal. Take five films you loved and five you disliked, and look up their critic and audience scores. You will probably find a pattern: perhaps you tend to side with critics, or with audiences, or with neither. After that, you can read any new gap through your own history. Someone who consistently prefers critics' favorites can follow the critic score. Someone who prefers crowd-pleasers should follow the audience.
Use the gap as a conversation starter
A large gap is a reason to watch. A film that critics and audiences disagree about is almost always a film with something to say, whether about expectations, taste or how we watch. Watching it, forming an opinion, and then discussing it with someone on the other side is more rewarding than watching another film everyone agrees on.
Adjust the weights to your own taste
If you trust some sources more than others, open the weighting controls on the film page and change them. The result updates instantly. Many people discover that they care much more about one source than the default weights suggest, and that is exactly the point of showing the weights openly. You can read how the defaults were chosen in the methodology, and learn about the typical causes of gaps in How to Read a Press vs Audience Gap.