Critics Finder

Find critics on Rotten Tomatoes that have the same taste as you.

Build

To build the project, run the following command:

go build -o bin/ ./cmd/critics_finder

Usage

Fetching the data

First, the data has to be fetched. This data is all the ratings of all the critics.

Use the fetch module for fetching the data.

Run the following commands (run subcommands with -h flag to see help information):

bin/critics_finder fetch critics
bin/critics_finder fetch all-reviews -w 32

Note: Especially the second command will take some time.

For debugging the subcommand fetch reviews is available to fetch the reviews of a specific critic and output some of them to the console.

Normalizing the data

Because there is no standard rating system on Rotten Tomatoes and everyone does what they want, the ratings need to be normalized. To do this, run

bin/critics_finder normalize

Common rating schemes

To get an idea, how the critics rate the movies, here are some common rating schemes:

x/10,
x/5,
x/4,
x (since you can't be sure about the scale, I said, that for x <= 5 it's x/5 and for 5 < x <= 10 it's x/10 and for larger x it's x/100)
x of 10
x out of 10
x stars
Grades A-F (with and without + and - before or after the letter),
...

Needless to say, some ratings are probably normalized incorrectly. But I hope, that the majority of correctly parsed ratings will dominate.

Ratings that couldn't be parsed at all or were I wasn't sure how to handle them, were simply ignored. Examples are

2.5.5
???
1-5 stars
high +3 out of -4..+4 (whoever wrote this, rated all of their reviews like that)
Recommended
...

Fill in your own ratings

To start the main part of the application, run

bin/critics_finder tui

It will start a user interface where you can add your own movie ratings.

Use Shift + <Arrows> to switch between the two windows.

On the right window: Search for a title and hit ENTER once it is selected (you need the exact string as in the autocomplete suggestions in the field for it to work). Then you can score the movie with a score between 0 (bad) and 100 (good).

On the left window: You can look through your ratings. You can change them by selecting a movie and hitting ENTER. Or you can remove them by hitting BACKSPACE.

Once you're done, hit Alt + ENTER. A new window will open showing the critics sorted by how close they rate movies like you. The lower their score, the better.

About `fallback.zip`

In case the API changes and the application can't process the responses, I attached fallback.zip. It contains the files written by

bin/critics_finder fetch critics
bin/critics_finder fetch all-reviews -w 32

from Sep. 17th 2023.

If the fecth commands don't work, simply extract the archive and put the contents into a directory called tmp inside the repository root.

The other steps (starting with the normalization) should work then.

MamfTheKramf/critics_finder