User ratings on iTunes alone can be misleading when you’re trying to decide which movie to buy or rent. A perfectly execrable movie might have a four or five star rating thanks to the efforts of a small pool of fans to bump its rating up.
The latest addition to iTunes seems particularly useful, then, in avoiding buying or renting a dud film: as of now, the iTunes movie store features the reviews of Top Critics and the Tomatometer rating score from the Rotten Tomatoes movie review aggregation site to let you see, at a glance, what critics thought of the movie you’re about to buy.
I hope this is just the first step towards Apple bringing more outside review data into iTunes as a whole. Being able to see at a glance if a movie is worth my time is great, but it would be fantastic to see the same sort of aggregation happen when I want to buy a new album, or even an App Store game.
[via TUAW]