To me, it can be hard to pin down what makes a movie “great” because the criteria change from genre to genre, and much of it is more of a subjective whole than an amalgamation of objective parts.

But, there is one metric my family uses to decide, unequivocally, if a movie was “bad” or not: if you watched it and it doesn’t lead to conversation, it was a bad movie. That means it didn’t spark any curiosity or need for discussion or even stand out in any way. Minimally, it wasn’t worth thinking about once it was over. I don’t mean short comments like “this effect was neat” or “I liked the part where…”, but substantive discussion of 5+ minutes.

By extension, movies that lead to discussions must be good, simply because there was “something about it” that spurred discussion. The specifics of that x-factor don’t really matter by this metric.

One thing I find interesting about this approach is that movies that many agree are objectively bad can lead to discussion if they are also unique or even just uniquely bad. And this approach says such movies are actually good, and I do agree with that.

The ones that end up consistently bad are big franchise films that are always same-samey, or other low-effort films that are mostly derivative.