FP A Caelivon Studios property

We read every review a film gets and throw out the ones that were bought or brigaded.

FP 84

412 counted · 828 thrown out of 1,240 readA specimen reading on an invented film. Nothing real has been scored yet.

Every score is built out of sentences. Here are some of ours, including the ones that did not count.

The camera never blinks, and by the third act that starts to feel less like patience and more like an accusation.

Field Notes Quarterly, eleven days after the screening

A masterpiece. Ten out of ten. Easily the best film of the decade.

611 of these arrived in 71 minutes, none longer than two lines, most before the film had screened anywhere

It is fifteen minutes too long and I would not give back a single one of them.

The Hollow Review, a working critic with nine years of filings behind her

2/10

217 verdicts with no sentence underneath, which tells us the temperature and nothing else

I did not like it. I have thought about almost nothing else since Tuesday, which is its own kind of review.

Second Reel, scored low, counted in full, and the number is better for it

None of this works until some slow human things happen.

Software is the fast part. These are the parts that take months, depend on people saying yes, and cannot be hurried by working harder. Nothing below has started.

Get the words, with permission Not started Every reading needs review text, and we want it licensed, one agreement at a time, from outlets and archives who know we have it. The slower road on purpose. Scraping around a paywall would poison the thing at the root.
Get critics to vouch for their own filings Not started A roster of working critics willing to confirm what they actually wrote, so that calling a review bought is something we can prove rather than infer.
Score a real film and survive the argument Not started One public reading, every discard visible, held up against everyone who disagrees with it. If the method cannot take that in the open, it is not a method.
Get a distributor to pay for a reading Not started First revenue, from someone who needs to know whether the wave that hit their film was real. One customer is the whole difference between a project and a business.
Get a major studio to take the call Not started The one that takes longest and cannot be bought. It happens after the readings are good enough that ignoring them costs more than answering the phone.

Who pays for it

Nobody yet, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. When the readings are worth something, two groups can pay: publishers and curators who want the filtered feed rather than a scraper, and independent distributors who need to know whether a wave was real.

Not advertising. An ad-funded score has an advertiser, and an advertiser eventually has an opinion about the score.

A studio can never pay us anything about a film we are scoring. Not for placement, not for early access, not for a report. That one is permanent.