ratings mean nothing except when they don't

24 Feb, 2026

yesterday, my brother asked me to help him revive his letterboxd account. most of it was just figuring out which movies he's seen or not, but then he began asking me for my opinion on those movies and why i chose to give the ratings i did. i don't think anything has proven more to me just how arbitrary ratings are than whatever sort of justification i was coming up with for how many stars or half-stars i chose to throw at a movie.

my standard, sort of

★★★★★ – foundational to me
★★★★½ – i really loved it
★★★★ – i loved it
★★★½ – i really liked it
★★★ – i liked it
★★½ – i'm lukewarm on it
★★ – i did not like it
★½ – i really did not like it
★ – i hated it
½ – i really hated it

i purposely opted not to use qualitative adjectives like bad or good because i personally rate things based on how much i enjoyed it over "objective" quality, whatever that may be. i also rate things based on what they promise to deliver i.e. a romcom promises nothing but attractive people falling in love and being cute together vs. a historical war drama promising to show you man's indomitable spirit amidst the crippling weight of responsibility. apples and oranges!

however, things get a little muddy once i start considering the option to "like" something on top of its rating. usually i throw in a like when i feel as if a movie really spoke to me in some way, regardless of how much i liked or disliked it. i might consider something i rated 3½ stars with a like more close to my heart than something i rated 4 stars without a like. as an extreme example, i thought the minecraft movie was absolutely terrible, but it was a fun, unserious sort of terrible¹ that reminded me of my own cringey adolescence where i spent much of my time playing minecraft. it got a one star rating and a like. call that nuance!

now you might be thinking: "wait a minute, didn't you just say you don't rate movies objectively? if you thought the minecraft movie was fun surely that would mean a rating higher than a single star?"

well, no! i thought the movie was just so bad in a way i cannot justify a rating higher than one star, even if i did have fun watching it. how much i enjoy a movie isn't the same as how much i enjoy my viewing experience, i think? and yes, i am aware it was a movie that did not aim to be anything profound either, but that just brings me back to title of this post and my point — that ratings mean nothing except when they don't. i would gladly rewatch the minecraft movie over most of the movies i have in the two star range simply because it has that like.

another similar example to the minecraft movie but on the opposite end of the spectrum is twilight. if i really think about its' enjoyability without all the sentimental value it provides me, i might have rated it somewhere between two to three stars. and yet, because i just absolutely adore twilight and its' ridiculousness, it is sitting at five stars on my letterboxd account. i will say i do not exactly share the same love for the subsequent movies in the series though.

with or without likes, the exact reason i give a certain movie its' rating varies too. i think the 2½ star zone is really fun because movies end up there for different reasons. recently, i watched antonioni's l'eclisse, a movie i thought was very competently made but simply... did not really care for. neither the characters (despite them being played by the very gorgeous alain delon and monica vitti) or the story really resonated with me. i did enjoy that it gave me a lot to think about, but i didn't exactly like it, so it landed itself in my "lukewarm" zone.

edit: i've since updated the rating of l'eclisse to 3 stars as of march 29, 2026! what a sneak

also sitting at 2½ stars is anyone but you, a romcom starring sydney sweeney and glen powell. i thought it was very run of the mill (although sweeney is not very good in it), but it is precisely because of its being so ordinary that there wasn't much to feel about it. so i ended up enjoying enough of the movie to not dislike it and there it is with the same rating as a foundational italian movie.

by the way, can we normalize 2½ stars not being a bad rating? average =/= bad!

additionally, i am always changing my ratings the more i think or don't think about a movie. sometimes i'll realize i don't actually like a movie as much as i thought i did; maybe i saw it cinemas and theaters worked their movie magic, or i made myself a victim of recency bias, or i gaslit myself into liking something because everyone else really liked it, or i started to like it less the more i thought about it, or i completely forget about it and realized it didn't actually have any lasting power over me. other times it's the opposite: i might have been hesitant to give a higher rating for whatever reason, but over time the movie lingered and really grew on me, or the movie just got better the more i thought about it.

so, i think the fact that i can't even fully commit to all my ratings (amongst many other reasons and my being oh-so-nuanced that i won't elaborate on) is just another reason that ratings aren't truly definitive of anything. well, to me at least. i literally don't enforce my own rating system. there's probably someone out there who does though, and does so very meticulously. you do you!

#media #movies