When people look for a movie to watch, we go online to places such as Rotten Tomatoes or IMDb to see reviews of the movie of interest. Based off of these websites' reviews, we conduct our own premature opinion of movies. Although this is helpful, one shouldn't treat a negative review as a fact and use a critic's opinion as a way to determine the curious viewer's opinion.

Most movie review websites split their reviews into the audiences' review and critics' review. This is good because the audience often give movies more praise than critics and at times can even be polar opposites. The problem is that many people never see the movie for themselves because they take a review to heart and disregard anything that has received negative input. Time and time again the critics miss on what becomes a hit with the general public and sometimes even becomes a great film over time. For example, Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" was not well received by the critics. Many newspapers felt the movie was a low for the great director and that the film's gore was nauseating and gruesome. Eventually this great film later would become one of the horror movie genre's most iconic films. Critics are helpful for getting a general idea of a film, but we should be careful about taking their opinion and stating the critic's viewpoint as a fact.

The only way to know whether a film is truly good is to watch it yourself. Nobody knows what you do and do not like. Although there are critics that we may believe we share similar tastes with, this shouldn't mean we refuse to watch a film because we read our favorite critic gives a bad response to a movie. Go ahead and further investigate and decide whether or not you would like to watch it by watching movie trailers, clips, and even friends and family. You may find that the film is receiving bad reviews for reasons you completely disagree with, and the movie may even end up becoming an iconic film as well.