[harry_hitch]

I detest the TIVO ratings. I have decided that a movie rated 3.5 stars is going to be the equivalent of a 4/5 and 4/4 equates to 5/5. 3 stars and below are literally 3 stars and below. I base my scores on the old Empire movie magazine/website ratings. I find Empire now to be part of the hype culture of reviews now, but 5 -10 years ago, they were excellent.
I now mainly use Time Out for reviews, which are very good, but I am not fully up to speed with their reviewers.
With regards to the IMDB ratings, I find IMDB a very useful site, but it's reviews in my eyes are often suspect. If you ever read some of the bad reviews for movies you will find there is not a lot of intelligent input. Often if a story is a slow burner for 90% of the movie, people will call it boring and switch off before the "pay-off" and thus drag the score down drastically. People also find "old" movies too tame and not "exciting" enough. Take The Italian Job for example, I have not seen either (shocking I know) but a lot of people under 25 will have seen the original. These people who then watch the original MAY find the original boring/priggish/slow/rubbish just because of the cast, quality of recording, script, how tame it is in comparison and of course Noel Coward!!!. I often judge 7.2/7.3/7.4 as a good score on IMDB due to the poor reviews. Anything below these scores I will generally class as poor overall (due to the reviews from the more "intelligent" film reviewer). Sorry, got carried away there.
BAck to the point, I don't know how to improve the TIVO review system, but it looks like TMS use American orientated reviews for their scores, would VM powered by TIVO be better using British based reviews (i.e Radio Times, Empire, Total Film, Time Out etc) due to different cultures etc? Just a thought!