Everybody has an opinion. Whether it’s bathroom fittings or movies, it’s easy to find two people who disagree on things most would consider set in stone.
For example, IMDb's Top 250 Movies list places The Shawshank Redemption (1994) at the top, followed by The Godfather (1972) and The Dark Knight (2008). Some might consider that a distinctly modern ranking that leaves out more 'classic' classics like Citizen Kane (1941) and 12 Angry Men (1957) - but can movies separated by so much time even be compared?
Natural Biases
The obvious problem is that rankings are subjective, designed by people who have natural biases towards genre, cast, and perhaps even producers and production companies.
Famous critic Roger Ebert had a list of films he hated. These are mostly justifiable, like the bizarre John Travolta film Battlefield Earth (2000), but some pop culture classics (1989's Dead Poets Society, 1988's Beetlejuice, and 1995's The Usual Suspects) ended up in his trash pile anyway. "Roger Ebert was [...] human", Far Out Magazine wrote about his 'misstep' with Dead Poets Society.
Part of that humanity is, apparently, to make lists of things we love and loathe (US president Richard Nixon reportedly had a list of 823 people and businesses he considered enemies). Of course, with the growth of the internet, the once-exclusive art of the critic became pedestrian, as everybody now had a platform and a potential audience for their voice.
With that in mind, is there any use left for ranking systems?
A Jumping-on Point
One place where ratings serve a purpose is in commerce. Most online stores rank their products by the attitude of customer reviews, price, and number of sales. This can be a valuable guide for consumers, even as it makes the task of promoting new products in an established market difficult.
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It’s perhaps unfair to compare professional reviews with personal ones, simply because the former are often written to earn money, such as via ad revenue on websites.
"Gamified"
In an article for Medium entitled "Why I Will Not Rate Films", the author complains that the simple act of watching a movie has been "gamified" to produce one big aggregate score for Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes. This makes movies the object of study, rather than enjoyment.
Observations like this run right through movie media. Wired Magazine insists that cinemagoers ignore IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes. Affinity Magazine says that ratings “don’t matter”. From a marketing perspective, the latter couldn’t be further from the truth. A fan might find themselves in easy agreement, however.
Overall, reviews, ratings, and rankings exist in a nebulous space between essential and potentially destructive, part-hobby, part cold-marketing engine. While they remain entertaining to the public to make and read, they're bound to stick around.