For a long time Rotten Tomatoes was my critic compiler of choice whenever I thought about seeing a new movie or couldn't decide which one to rent. Especially after the demise of Mr. Showbiz, Rotten Tomatoes was my go-to site; the now-famous Tomatometer, displaying in a simple bar graph the percentage of positive reviews from its culled critics around the Web, and the quick-glance fresh or rotten tomato icon alongside a linked quote from each source made the site well worth visiting. And yet, even with all of its appeal, the site was just a little too cute, and far too busy.
So, now that I've stumbled across Metacritic, I think I'll stay there. It, too, has its quirks, but the design is clean and straightforward, and I can find what I'm looking for faster than I could on Rotten Tomatoes. It uses a trademarked "Metascore," which "shows the critical consensus at a glance by taking a weighted average of critic grades" on a 100-point scale. In addition to film reviews, it has sections for video/dvd, music, and games.
What do you think about these two critic-compiling sites? Which one do you use? Or have you found an even better one?
Metacritic is clearly better, for the same reasons you mention. I much prefer their average to RT's ratio. And beyond films, Metacritic dominates. Nobody does music like Metacritic, and for videogames, Metacritic & GameRankings are head and shoulders ahead of RT.
I, too, started with RT, but they've clearly been passed.
True, true.
One of the first times I checked out the site, I saw right up on the home page the new Sufjan Stevens album, "Seven Swans." How cool that this site would feature a relatively unknown musician when they could just as easily have given the highly visible spot to Jessica Simpson or Clay Aiken or Janet Jackson.