hmm nolan barely beating out tarantino.
If you adjust Death Proof (as I demonstrated in an earlier post, the Death Proof rating is wrong which implicates the average), the opposite is true and by almost exactly the same margin.
Three more complaints about RT:
1. It tends to exaggerate small differences in opinion by forcing a"fresh" or "rotten" rating on a picture. In the case of Ebert, for example a film that he rates 2 and a half stars (out of four) is counted as rotten while a film that he rates three stars is counted as fresh. The tomatometer treats that situation no differently than if he gave one film zero stars and the other four. In that sense, RT's "average rating" is profoundly retarded.
2. It's largely based on star-ratings. Star ratings are frequently pretty arbitrary with little to distinguish them at the margins in the first place. I think few critics, if any, would be able to cleanly describe the difference between a one star film and a one-and-a-half star film in a way that all their previous reviews could match up with. Several critics have conceded that they only use star rating systems because their editors force them to.
3. RT, in its present form, is only marginally good at capturing a film's perceived average at a single point in time. The reality is that lots of movies have their reputation alter significantly over time as they either age poorly or grow more influential. In some sense, this makes the tomato-meter a lie. For example it gives 2001: A Space Odyssey a 96% rating presently. That film sharply divided critics when it came out; famously so. Time Magazine ran something like five different reviews of the film over a period of 18 months with each review getting successively getting better. But the Tomato-Meter only captures reviews of the film since 2000, so it doesn't actually capture what critics thought at the time and instead appears to validate critical opinion as having been consistent. This is true for a range of older films and it has shut out entire generations of film critics like Pauline Kael and Bosley Crowther. To grab a more recent example going the other direction, the 25th Hour is a film that has had its reputation increase even since its release in 2002, culminating in its inclusion on several "Best of the Decade" lists at the end of the last year. RT shows it as having a rating in the mid-1970s.
In sum, RT sucks. Read full reviews that actually communicate something other than a number.
. he has a proven trackrecord