The Most Critically Divisive Films According To Data

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So to find out, we turned to review aggregator Metacritic. The site takes reviews from critics, normalises the scores on a scale of 1-100 (so if the critic scores out of 5, 4 stars becomes 80, 3 stars is 60 and so on - and if they use school-grading-style letters of the alphabet, the site has a way of approximating a score for those too).

We downloaded as much of the Metacritic movies database as we could - 9516 films at the time we scraped, with details over 190,000 reviews by at least named 842 critics. The thinking was that to get a review on Metacritic, a publication has to at least be somewhat decent. And that by focusing on critical reaction, this means that we avoid any "normal" user polling data, which is open to manipulation by coordinated voting and so on.

This also gave us a pool of films to analyse that was of reasonable size: It will definitely have every major release of recent years, and unlike using, say, IMDB’s database, it won’t mix in TV shows, student films, adverts and whatever other detritus IMDB lists alongside films. From glancing through the films we’re analysing, Metacritic’s pool of films is definitely biased towards the post-internet era for obvious reasons - though it does feature some older films (particularly bigger releases and films that people still care about today).

Obviously there could conceivably some issues - Metacritic’s database could have missing films or contain mistakes. Or maybe our data-scraping tool contains flaws (though we’re pretty confident in it). So by and large, we think this is a decent dataset.

And then to work out how controversial each was? We simply applied a common statistical test: Standard Deviation (SD), which provides a “score” of how diverse a given set of scores are. To be clear, this isn’t score about the quality of the film - it's a score showing how much critics agree or disagree. So if a film has reviews all over the place, it gets a high SD - and if critics tend to agree about a film, it will have a low score.

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1. Melancholia
2. The Counselor
3. Sin City
4. The Neon Demon
5. Inception
6. The Hateful Eight
7. 21 Grams
8. Youth
9. Under the Skin
10. Somewhere
11. The Wolf of Wall Street
12. The Passion of the Christ
13. Savages
14. To The Wonder
15. I heart Huckabees

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