Average ratings for the film festivals I've attended in 2012 to date.

Those of you ready to stage an intervention (my parents, my bank account, my boss, Jordan Hoffman, my countless imaginary boyfriends) will not be surprised to learn I have attended eight film festivals this year so far. 

I always rate the movies I see from a 1-10 scale where 10 is best and 1 is worst.  I just now put everything onto Excel and I thought I'd put up here how all the averages worked out.

If you'd asked me in advance how this would net out, I'd probably say I expected Sundance and Hot Docs to be the highest, and Tribeca and SXSW to be the lowest. And the others in the middle.

So I am fairly surprised to see that in fact this is where I ended up:



I work in quantitative market research and so I guess it is fair to say there are some entries where the sample size is a bit small to be relying on the results - but it's interesting anyway. 

 The highest rated one, Fantastic Fest, included two... I won't call them classics, I'll say re-issues I guess. Movies originally released over 20 years ago.

 There's no festival on here I regret attending.  I loved them all.

 The lowest ranked one (Seattle) would have been ranked higher if I could have included a title that I can't list on account of I signed an NDA.

 Is this an indication of the "best festival" or something like that? Eh - I tend to say now. I think one can attribute part of these findings to the quality of the films but a bigger part actually to the way I make my own decisions on what I'll see there.

I would imagine the more movies I'm able to see at a film festival, the higher the chances that I'll choose something "meh" just for the sake of filling a time slot.   And the fewer movies I'm able to see, I feel like I'm probably much more careful about choosing very wisely. 

I wish I could look back at averages from years past, but I don't know if any change year over year would more be attributed to my own standards tightening up or actual better/worse years for the program of each fest. 

I suppose at the end of the year I will post a long list of all the movies I saw as well as the ratings and stuff. For now I'll just say that I've seen 297 films including 40 at the IFC Center. And out of those 297, a total of 12 titles earned a "10 out of 10" rating.   But one of them was a TV show, two of them came out 50+ years ago and I just now saw them for the first time, and one of them came out last year. So.

Remaining fests this year are New York Film Festival and DocNYC.   I can't think of any others.