bryant

Mostly, attaching a numeric rating to a review and then presenting them in order makes it easier to pick out a strongly positive review or a strongly negative one, or to deliberately locate one that's just about balanced. Rottentomatoes' thumbs-up/thumbs-down philosophy kind of makes every review into a crap shoot. Just because they type a review as negative, for instance, doesn't mean there's no praise whatsoever in the film. I like metacritic because I can see where all the reviewers fell along the scale from good to bad, and the orderly presentation just makes it simpler to find things.