Scaling Professional Critics: Men and Women Rate Films

Abstract

Film critic research typically attends to the impact of critics' ratings and reviews on box office receipts. With few exceptions, critics are treated as a homogeneous group. Taking a different approach, this article explores similarities and differences among critics. First, in a test of potential differential influences of the objectification of women harbored in the “Male Gaze,” no significant difference between male and female critics' median ratings was found. Second, differences and similarities among critics did appear in their rankings along a “kindness” dimension. Specifically, produced by a Correspondence Analysis which used the complete rating “profiles” of 25 professional film critics who contributed 6389 ratings to Film Comment, it was possible to rank critics from most to least kind. Third, differences in kindness ratings between two subsets (male and female critics) set the stage for another examination of the continuing influence of the Male Gaze: while males were distributed across the entire kindness scale, female critics clustered around the central (or average) kindness profile. The observed similarities and differences among critics are discussed in terms of the divergent influences of professional canons and ideological issues, such as the Male Gaze.