Declared the nation's most reliable movie critic, the Reader's film editor reflects on the foolishness of turning prose into numbers.
by J.R. Jones
Last week I was lifted from obscurity to semiobscurity when the website Vocativ announced that I was the most reliable movie critic in the country. "Screening for Hacks: America's Movie Critics, Rated" is based on a formula that writers Adam K. Raymond and Matan Gilat concocted using numerical data from Metacritic, one of those sites that harvests reviews, converts them into number values, and averages these to rank new releases.…[ Read more ]