> But the critic still has to be within the ballpark of popular tastes if the expectation is a mass audience that really trusts their recommendations, right?
Well, no, because I'm pretty sure most film critics aren't trying to directly provide a "yes or no" recommendation to a general movie-going audience. I've read plenty of film criticism that was entertaining and informative despite me having very little shared taste with the writer. And I suspect if you asked film critics to straight up predict what the RottenTomatoes audience score for a film would be, the aggregate of film critics' predictions would tend to be closer to the RT audience score than the RT critic score itself.
Well, no, because I'm pretty sure most film critics aren't trying to directly provide a "yes or no" recommendation to a general movie-going audience. I've read plenty of film criticism that was entertaining and informative despite me having very little shared taste with the writer. And I suspect if you asked film critics to straight up predict what the RottenTomatoes audience score for a film would be, the aggregate of film critics' predictions would tend to be closer to the RT audience score than the RT critic score itself.