The lovable high-brows at Miller-McCune did some sort of mathematical voodoo to a zillion movie reviews and figured out critics' favorite and least favorite actors, as well as which critics are the nicest and the meanest.

Using scores from Metacritic, Miller-McCune weighted the critical scores of actors' movies with the relative size of their roles in those movies. The final list shows that everyone who was in Lord of the Rings is an awesome actor with great taste in projects, with Elijah Wood topping the list and Viggo Mortenson and Ian Holm (the British geezer who played Bilbo Baggins) making the top four, too. Philip Seymour Hoffman is as good as you think and Jessica Alba is a hack. Bottoming out the list was Freddie Prinze, Jr., followed by someone named Eddie Griffin and a tragic Matthew Lillard who had so much potential, once. Here's an abridged sampler:



Equally interesting was scatterplot showing the relative niceness and consistency of America's 25 most prolific movie critics. We discover that the Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington drinks the kool-aid more than any other critic, followed by the Chicago Sun-Times' Robert Ebert's perennially upraised thumbs. The meanest critic in America is the Austin Chronicle's Marc Savlov, who gives low scores but deviates regularly. On the other hand, TV Guide's Maitland McDonagh gives low scores and has a relatively low standard deviation from her mean score, meaning she's always stone cold.

[Miller-McCune]







Go to Full Article