An interesting article, most certainly. I suppose the immediate response is the critic sphere is heavily self selected for people who really like books / movie

An interesting article, most certainly. I suppose the immediate response is the critic sphere is heavily self selected for people who really like books / movies / comics / etc. So what to most normal people would seem like flowery platitudes and a cultural aversion to tough talk might actually be a completely genuine love of the medium itself. If you just love to read, it's not vapid pleasantness to call every book fun and a joy - it's just how you genuinely feel. >I hate to sound like a philistine, but audience-critic discrepancies often occur when a work is less than pleasant to sit through, whether because of The Sorrow and the Pity–like length (a growing problem, pun intended) or grim subject matter. Take last year’s Best Picture winner, Moonlight, which has a 98 critics’ and 79 audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, and which I haven’t seen. The Rotten Tomatoes blurb calls it “The tender, heartbreaking story of a young man’s struggle to find himself, told across three defining chapters in his life as he experiences the ecstasy, pain, and beauty of falling in love, while grappling with his own sexuality.” I can get that at home. I think this is another element of the critic sphere being very self selected. For whatever reason it selects for literary realist types who honestly care more about depressing stories featuring puppies with broken legs than any kind of sci-fi, fantasy, etc. genre film that's merely fun and not "meaningful". The critics aren't behaving fallaciously or malevolently, they as a group simply have genuinely different preferences for entertainment. >Here’s the heart of the problem: The set of critics’ and audiences’ interests do not perfectly overlap but rather form a Venn diagram. Ultimately, this is the real problem whatever is causing the divergence in interests. It makes it hard to use critics, and harder to identify the genuine diamonds in the rough for you personally. My personal solution is simply look to the average person directly. The internet is full of forums, and many of them discuss whatever medium you happen to care about, and those forums are invariably going to have plenty of threads along the lines of "What is your favorite lost gem?", "What movie do you think flew under the radar?" "What deserved more credit than it got?".