FAQ

Q: So, how are the over­all rat­ings calculated?
A: The over­all rat­ing for a given movie is sim­ply an aver­age of the rat­ings given by crit­ics from var­i­ous publications/websites.
I go through every publication/website in the publications/websites list (see below) look­ing for reviews for a given movie. For each review, I take the rat­ing given by the critic and con­vert it to a 0–99 point scale. (For those crit­ics who do not pro­vide a rat­ing, I assign a rat­ing from 0–99 based on the gen­eral impres­sion given by the review.). These indi­vid­ual critic rat­ings are then aver­aged together to come up with an over­all rating.
Q. Is there an weighted aver­age (some critics/publications get­ting more weigh­tage)? Is there a nor­mal­i­sa­tion of the ratings?
A. No and no. (I ain’t that good at math.)
At this point the site is meant to be a sim­ple indi­ca­tor of how a movie has been per­ceived amongst the top crit­ics and to pro­vide links to all the reviews on a sin­gle page. This might change in the future.
Q. How are the over­all rat­ings meant to be read? What the dif­fer­ence between a rat­ing of 20 and that of 68?
A. What do you think is the dif­fer­ence? Any­way, I am pro­vid­ing these phrases as an indicator.


Gen­eral Mean­ing of Score Over­all rat­ing range
Uni­ver­sal acclaim 80–99
Gen­er­ally favor­able reviews 60–79
Mixed or aver­age reviews 40–59
Gen­er­ally unfa­vor­able reviews 20–39
Over­whelm­ing dislike 0–19
Q: Taran Adarsh on Bol­ly­wood Hungama gave Jail a rat­ing of 3 stars but why the hell have you listed it as 75?
A: Well, to make the cal­cu­la­tion of the over­all rat­ing eas­ier, all the the crit­ics’ rat­ings are con­verted to a 0–99 scale. It also pro­vides an easy way to com­pare the indi­vid­ual critic rat­ings against one another.
If you really want to know the orig­i­nal rat­ing, you can always click on the full review link and find out.
Q: What’s this con­ver­sion scale you talk about?
A: Since most (all infact) crit­ics use a 5-point star rat­ing sys­tem, the con­ver­sion scale fol­lowed is:


Their rat­ing Con­verts To
5 99
4.5 89
4 79
3.5 69
3 59
2.5 49
2 39
1.5 29
1 19
0.5 9
0 0
Q: I read Taran Adarsh’ review of Jail and I swear it sounded like a 88, why did you give it an 75?
A: Most crit­ics include some sort of rat­ing for the movie they are review­ing, whether it is on a 5-star scale, a 100-point scale, a let­ter grade, or other mark. How­ever, plenty of other review­ers choose not to do this. This poses a prob­lem for the over­all rat­ing cal­cu­la­tion, which is based on num­bers. Thus, I must assign a numeric score, from 0–99, to each review that is not already scored by the critic. Nat­u­rally, there is some dis­cre­tion involved, and there will be times when you dis­agree with the rat­ings I assigned.
(How­ever, when one reads 30 reviews film after film and reviewer after reviewer, you begin to develop a decent idea about the rat­ing a reviewer might give.)
Q: Which crit­ics and publications/websites are included in your ratings?
A: See the list below. Addi­tions and/or dele­tions to the list do hap­pen now and then.


  • Aslibaat
  • Blog­i­cal Conclusion
  • Bol­ly­wood Hungama
  • Buzz18
  • DNA
  • Filmfare
  • Glamsham
  • Hin­dus­tan Times
  • IBNLive
  • IBOS Network
  • India Today
  • Indian Express
  • Indiatimes
  • Khalid’s Spot
  • MidDay
  • Mum­bai Mirror
  • NDTV
  • Now Running
  • Outlook
  • PassionforCinema
  • Rediff
  • Sify
  • StarBoxOffice
  • Stardust
  • The New Indian Express
  • The Times of India
  • Time Out
  • WOGMA

*Note: Some crit­ics pub­lish their reviews in more than one publication/website, in that case I only include one publication/website.

Q: Why don’t you have ALL reviews for every movie from ALL publications?
A. Umm.. I don’t think that is pos­si­ble. Esp. since these days every Joe Schmo with a blog posts a review and rates movies.
Q: Why is Times of India included but my “Bol­ly­wood Dhamaka No.1″ web­site isn’t?
A. This is indeed a tough ques­tion to answer. But I can assure you that I spent con­sid­er­able amount of time eval­u­at­ing and research­ing and only then came up with a list. (I made chits and picked them out of a hat.)
Seri­ously though, I included publications/critics that (1) are well-regarded and known for qual­ity reviews; (2) seemed to have qual­ity reviews; and (3) actu­ally had a good quan­tity of reviews and wrote them consistently.
Q: I don’t agree with how you go about _____ . “I can do it at home for nothing”.
A: Firstly, I actu­ally “did it at home for noth­ing”. Sec­ondly, if you have bet­ter ideas and means of going about things here, please do get in touch. (Or if you are good at math and Word­Press.) I would love to know and improve. Thridly, the goal of the site is to be a sim­ple indi­ca­tor of how a movie has been per­ceived amongst the top crit­ics and to pro­vide links to all the reviews on a sin­gle page.
Q: How do you deter­mine which movies to include on the site? How come Kac­chi Kali Ki Suhaag Raat isn’t included?
A. I include every movie that gets released nation­wide and is reviewed by the pub­li­ca­tions listed above.
Q: How often is the site updated?
A. As soon as the reviews start rolling in on Fri­day and then every sin­gle day after that.
Q. Have you copied some of this FAQ from Metacritic?
A. Yes.
Q. Who designed the site?
A. I did. Most of it is inspired by the work of Josef Müller Brock­mann.