Every review on this site is written by one person, scored out of 10 on one scale, and published under a name. This page is what that scale means and what I will and will not do to produce it. It exists because a number is worthless if you do not know how it was arrived at.
Three things I refuse to do
I will not review a film I have not watched in full. Not from a trailer, not from a synopsis, not from the first forty minutes. That applies to every review here, including the ones drafted with software: those are written in advance and then wait for me to watch the film and release them.
One honest exception, because it would be visible from the publishing dates anyway. A drafted review that has been sitting unreleased for a week publishes itself, so that a fortnight away from home does not stop the site. If you are reading something published on its automatic date, I had not got to it yet. The score and the verdict on it are still mine, and if watching it changes either one, the review is corrected and the change noted rather than quietly swapped.
I will not review a film outside my own taste. If I know I cannot judge something fairly, I do not score it. Most sites review everything, which is how films end up marked down for being the kind of film they always intended to be. Declining is the more honest answer.
I do not take money for reviews. No paid placements, no sponsored scores, no arrangements with studios or distributors. The opinion is mine, the humour is mine, and the judgement behind it is justified by knowledge and by criteria applied consistently.
How the score actually works
There is no definitive answer to what separates a 7 from an 8, because the score is not a checklist. A film I give an 8 might have five things wrong with it, all of them small. A film I give a 7 might have only one or two, but they matter more. The number weighs how much the flaws cost the film, not how many there are.
That is why a review here can list several problems and still land high, and why another can list almost nothing and land lower. The list and the number answer different questions.
Why nothing has ever scored a 10
Not a rule. A consequence.
Excellence is the hardest thing to grade. When a film is genuinely very good, staying objective means going looking for reasons to bring the number down, and the search always finds something. Then the doubt arrives: is that fair? Perhaps it is, for the sake of applying the same process to everything. But who am I to say?
The result is a distribution that stops short of the top. You can see the whole of it, film by film, on every score on SpoilSins.
What this scale is measuring
The film that was made, not the film you were hoping for.
Most people judge a film against their expectations rather than against the film. If someone expects to like something and does, but it lands below what they had built up beforehand, they mark it down anyway. If they wanted the story to go one way and it went another, they score it lower than it deserves. The failure is not keeping an open mind long enough to notice that the film in front of them is good on its own terms. I try not to do that, and this page is partly a commitment to being held to it.
When you should ignore the score entirely
Anyone who does not do this professionally, which is almost everyone, including me. A score is only a score. I do this as a hobby.
Actors, writers, directors and the people who build the effects are all genuinely talented, but at the end of the day this is not nuclear power, it is not going to space, it is not brain surgery, and it does not alter the planet. It is a film, made to be enjoyed or to give you something to think about. Even people who work in film should not take scores too seriously.
Spoilers
The name is the warning. Reviews here discuss endings, twists and everything else, on purpose, because you cannot honestly assess how a film resolves without saying how it resolves. If you have not seen it and want to, read the score and the one-line verdict and stop there.
Corrections
If something here is factually wrong, tell me and it gets fixed with the change noted. Opinions are not errors and will not be revised because someone disagreed, but a wrong date, a wrong name or a misdescribed scene is an error and will be.