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Whom can you trust?


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(CNN) -- We live in an opinion-heavy world, when anyone with a modem can play movie reviewer. Who's to say that a critic is on the level?

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• Interactive: The critics rave 

• Hollywood Bitchslap: Criticwatch external link
• Comprehensive review site: RottenTomatoes.com external link
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Joey Berlin, the head of the Broadcast Film Critics Association, says that his group vets all members to make sure of their bona fides: that they work for stations or networks and regularly provide movie reviews for them.

"We have formal standards," he says, which include making sure quotes used in ads have actually been part of on-air reviews (or, in the case of a review being pre-empted, were intended to be part of an on-air review).

Some critics, he adds, "are more cooperative in getting quotes to a studio before a movie releases." But as long as the critic is reviewing the movie upon release, the association has no problem, he says.

For his part, Criticwatch's Erik Childress would just like studios and reviewers to be more rigorously transparent about their affiliations. For example, some critics are listed as working for TV networks when they actually only work for network affiliates.

And blurb-supplying critics themselves do have feelings, even if they're lightly regarded by their colleagues and the industry. They know when they've become the butt of jokes for liking something nobody else does -- or for using "it's the best film ever!" language.

"A couple people at studios have said, 'This is funny to you,' " Variety's Timothy Gray says about his best-of blurbs column. " 'But it's not to these critics.' So that's the flip side."

-- Todd Leopold


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