The methodology is weird, and the concept is strange, but the folks at Gizmodo (god bless ’em) have used actual science to calculate which film critic is the most contrarian. Now, before you yell “Armond White!” he’s not included, because Metacritic doesn’t tally his reviews, thus he’s ineligible for this list. Plus, he’d bristle at the idea.
“I never accepted the term contrarian,” White told Flicks last month. “I think that’s offensive, frankly. And my response to that is: if I’m a contrarian, what are other reviewers? What I strive to do is be a good critic, not somebody who simply accepts the product put in front of me. I guess it scares people to think that they don’t have any originality; that they don’t have the capacity to think for themselves.”
Burn.
Anyway, I’ll let Gizmodo explain how they arrived at determining which critics are most contrarian, because I refuse to try and summarize this:
So to find the most contrarian critic, we took our pool of around 184,000 film reviews downloaded from Metacritic, and worked out how far that reviews’ score was from the average score for that film. We then totted them up for films with over 30 reviews (so there would be no enormous swings based on little data), and averaged them out for each critic in the database who has over 50 reviews listed on the site. That’s 366 critics all in all, and each has been given a score, which is their average distance from the critical average score…
Okay, let’s just dive in, shall we? Well, The Playlist is proud to announce that our own Drew Taylor (we love you) is apparently the eighth most contrarian critic…ever? Well, for however long Metacritic has been filing his reviews. “Contrarian” is hardly a term we’d ever use to describe Drew’s cinematic taste, but I guess math doesn’t lie.
Elsewhere, I personally rank at #42 for some reason — I guess I hate the thirty odd movies I review each year? Jessica Kiang — who easily writes the bulk our stuff is way down at #175. Our Editor-in-chief, Rodrigo Perez, is up at #151 just a couple spaces ahead of Nikola Grozdanovic at #153. Our features lead Oliver Lyttelton stands at #191. Our awards guru Gregory Ellwood lands at #315 and has been given the distinction of “barometers of critical opinion.”
Our Slack channel is on fire with these results, so sorry #1 ranking Hal Hinson of Washington Post, we’re not talking about you. Top twenty below, and click here for the full rankings.
1) Hal Hinson (45.9697)
2) Phil Hall (37.5292)
3) Diego Semerene (25.6672)
4) Eric Campos (22.4503)
5) Gene Siskel (22.2135)
6) Rex Reed (21.2553)
7) Andrew Schenker (20.6337)
8) Drew Taylor (20.2956)
9) Eric Hynes (19.7705)
10) Chris Cabin (19.4809)
11) Barbara Shulgasser (19.2367)
12) Bill White (18.9479)
13) Richard Brody (18.0811)
14) Kyle Smith (17.9178)
15) Charles Taylor (17.8706)
16) Amy Taubin (17.4726)
17) Michael Atkinson (17.4046)
18) Stephen Hunter (17.2302)
19) Martin Tsai (17.0751)
20) Bob Graham (17.0495)