Thoughts on giving films a numerical rating.

It is difficult to rate movies, yes, like what makes a movie 6 and what makes it 6.5 or 7? But its is what it is. Numbers just put a line in the sand, like i like this movie better than that one, and that movie was just awful. But its all up to the individual. But i do feel, rating of 5 stars, is just too narrow to capture everything. 100, like rotten tomatoes is good, 10 is also decent. Most folks reading reviews, don't even bother with what was written, just scroll down for the number. If it attracts people to watching a particular movie, then why not. Even when I am looking for a movie, searching through IMDB, i filter based on the rating.


I just remember school days, its just like scoring essays. 2+2 is 4 and concrete, and can be marked as right or wrong. But teachers give scores on writing every day or maybe every semester,

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My Favorite Films

Where I do start...

First, letter grading is actually out of 13. You have A+, A, A-, B+, B, B-, C+, C, C-, D+, D, D-, and F. It's a slightly more nuanced and stylised variation on the ten-point scale and one I've been considering switching to if not for the fact that people seem to have more trouble agreeing on what specific letter grades mean than on what numerical ratings mean.

Second, I've never heard anyone say "What would you rate this out of 100?", and I'd like to know if you have either.

Third, rating out of 100 seems much more cumbersome and unnecessarily specific than the aforementioned letter system. What is the difference between an 84/100 and an 85/100, for example? Or a 12/100 versus a 13/100? As has been noted, the reason 5-point ratings or 10-point ratings exist is to simplify a person's presumably complicated thoughts and feelings regarding a work down into an easily-digestible number. Making the number too large and too precise seems to be missing the point in that regard - if I want that level of nuance, I'll just read an actual review instead of trying to decipher it from a number that I've instinctively rounded to the nearest 10 anyway.

As for other ratings, do thumbs-up/thumbs-down assessments count as ratings? That's effectively a two-point rating scale.

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

A-F is a 5-1 rating: A, B, C, D and F. The E is skipped in both grades in school and in other ratings.

Well, I'd certainly try to explain my position on the films rather than just rank them. But I suppose I should have been more clear: I'm not worked up about any of this and none of it's a personal rule. If I do want to rank some films I will. I'm not personally against it and I don't think it's a bad/wrong thing to do. It's just not something I want to focus on right now, because I have found it distracting recently. More power to anyone who wants to.

So I took the measure today to remove all my ratings on Letterboxd. I may live to regret this later, but at least if I do return to rating films I can start fresh.

I don't rate films anymore as I find that there is no consistency between my ratings.

I find it really hard to rate films. In my head I either like it and would see it again, thought it was ok, or didn’t like it.

I made a similar thread a while ago, talking about the amount of stress that came with rating movies, as weird as that sounds. Thank God I have abandoned the entire habit since the beginning of this year, as it was getting to a point where thinking about a numerical score for a film got in the way of my overall enjoyment.

Wow, I can't image being stressed over something that simple. But yeah if it stresses you out just don't do it.