Metacritic is cool

Most of my friends and family love to talk about movies. Movies are the subject of many blog posts. A commonly-felt "loved it," "liked it," or "hated it" often pave the way to friendships. So, is there a cool site where you can get recommendations as to the latest "in theater" films, as well as DVD's? Yep! Check out Metacritic.

While the Internet Movie Database is clearly the definitive Internet source for everything "Movie," Metacritic is what I use to decide what movies I will attend, and what DVD's I rent from Netflix.

Here is how it works. Metacritic takes the reviews from almost all major critics/publications and then weights each review on a scale of 1 t0 100. The average is the "final grade." Then they assign it a color, green being 100 - 60, yellow 59 - 40, and red being below 40. You can sort by title or by ranking.

Once you select a movie, all of the actual reviews are listed in descending rank, and if you click on any one of them it will take you to the actual review in full -- totally cool.

For instance, Little Miss Sunshine is rated 80 based on 37 reviews, all of which are listed, and include, TV Guide (100), LA Times (100), SF Chronicle (100), Wall St. Journal (90), Newsweek (90), Time (80), Salon.com (80), Village Voice (40).

At least every week I go to Metacritic, select "DVD" and then "recent releases" and sort by ranking. I check out all the "greens" and read reviews that interest me and decide which ones I want to add to my Neflix queue. Neat! Sometimes if I'm wondering about a movie I have heard about from other sources, I sort by title and see how it's ranked.

There are lots of other features that I will let you discover for yourself. Five out of five on Tom's "cool meter." Check it out. You won't regret it.

~ Tom