IT’S POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Be Suspicious Of Online Movie Ratings, Especially Fandango’s. “Several sites have built popular rating systems: Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic and IMDb each have their own way of aggregating film reviews. And while the sites have different criteria for picking and combining reviews, they have all built systems with similar values: They use the full continuum of their ratings scale, try to maintain consistency, and attempt to limit deliberate interference in their ratings. These rating systems aren’t perfect, but they’re sound enough to be useful. All that cannot be said of Fandango, a NBCUniversal subsidiary that uses a five-star rating system in which almost no movie gets fewer than three stars.”

Do not trust content from NBC Universal.