The Grid
At Griddy Films, I use a specially designed grid to rate movies (see sample grid above). First, I rate a movie within 10 distinct categories to determine it's overall strengths and weaknesses, relative to my tastes and opinions. The categories include:
Writing: Plot/Genre
Writing: Characters
Acting/Casting
Cinematography: Lighting
Cinematography: Camera Work
Editing/Special Effects
Sound
Aesthetics
Impact on film
Overall enjoyment
Each category except for "overall enjoyment" and "impact on film" contains five subcategories rated on a scale from zero to ten, zero to two being "unsatisfactory" and ten being "perfect". "Impact on film" only has three subcategories and "overall enjoyment" is rated strictly zero to ten. Each category score is then averaged out to determine a single rating of zero to ten for each of the ten categories.
For example, if the total score for sound was 37, I would divide that by the number of subcategories (five) to determine the category score of 7.4 out of ten, which exceeds my expectations (see grading rubric at the bottom of the sample grid, above). Up to five points of extra credit are also available. I then add the totals for each category, including extra credit, to determine the film's overall rating on a scale from 0 to 100.