Everybody’s a Movie Critic: New Web Sites and Online Readers Chime In
LOS ANGELES — They have suffered pay cuts, layoffs and Hollywood’s urge to write them off every time a poorly reviewed movie makes good at the box office. But America’s film critics, an ornery lot, are not dead yet. In fact, their craft has shown flickering signs of new life lately — though not the kind that leaves ink-stained cinephiles entirely comfortable. The last few weeks have brought the debut of Moviereviewintelligence.com , a new Web site committed to monitoring, scoring and proliferating the work of critics at some 65 print and broadcast outlets. Started by David A. Gross, a former marketing executive with 20th Century Fox, the new site is replete with charts and graphs that track the good, the bad and the ugly of reviews. Those numbers assess matters as granular as the average time at which reviews appear after the movie’s release (1.4 hours after release for “Land of the Lost” ) and the productivity of individual critics (Leah Rozen at People is good for 2.6 reviews a week,