Contrarian Movie Reviews

Rotten Tomatoes logoAs a movie fan/data nerd, I visit the website Rotten Tomatoes a lot. It’s a movie review aggregator site, which tells you what percentage of reviewers consider a movie a hit or a miss. Movies where more than 60% of reviewers consider it worth watching are classed as “Fresh”, while any movie with less than 60% good reviews is considered “Rotten”.

It’s not the most nuanced of review sites, but it gives you a good overview of critical opinion.


Another thing it allows you to do is see, at a glance, how certain reviewers review movies, and how often their opinions coincide, or not, with the general consensus. For instance, notorious contrarian Armond White only agrees with the consensus 53% of the time as I write this (Films he considers misses include: The Wrestler, Toy Story 3, The Dark Knight, There Will Be Blood. Films he considers hits: Grown Ups, Jonah Hex, G.I.Joe 2, Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, Transformers 2).

I wondered which critic disagreed with the consensus the most. Is there any critic, for example, who agreed with the general consensus 0% of the time?

Well, a bit of Google-fu shows that there are lots of critics who are contrarian 100% of the time, but a deeper look shows that almost all of these have only reviewed one or maybe two movies. If you only review one movie, especially if that movie rates around 60%, then the chances of you giving slightly over 60% and the consensus being slightly under 60% (or vice-versa) are pretty good.

So I decided that a critic had to have reviewed at least five movies. With that in mind, I found one person who had a 100% contrarian rate; And that person is Rod Gudino! Yay!

Rod has reviewed seven movies at the time of writing, between 2002 and 2006, and none of his ratings agree with the critical consensus. That’s quite an achievement.

I guess it might also explain why he hasn’t had any movie reviews published in the last decade.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *