TheReviewMonk aims to build an online community for the millions of movie-goers and lovers of Indian cinema. The site aggregates movie reviews from some of the best publications and critics across India to arrive at a normalized film score, for every film that releases in India. This score, along with the critic and audience reviews, can help movie-goers decide how likely they are to enjoy a film.

For a century, we have relied on the word-of-mouth from our circle of like-minded movie aficionados and the reviews of our favourite critics in the weekend newspapers for our pre-assessment, before getting in line for a matinee show. The passion that we have for our films manifests itself in our detailed discussions and friendly arguments over films that we love to watch over and over again and those that we love to hate. When it comes to movie fandom, we are a unique bunch. The site hopes to bring together, these voices of the experts and the fans.

We hand-pick reviews from certified movie critics in India from various sources including notable newspapers, magazines and websites. When it comes to critic reviews, we strongly believe in quality over quantity and so we strive to include only reliable, unbiased sources. The final score is a simple average of all the critic ratings. It is on a ten-point scale –with 10 being the highest possible rating and 0 being the lowest. We normalize the scores from critics, which means that if a critic gives a film 3 out of 5 stars, it is a 6 out of 10 on TRM. If it is 3 out of 4, then that will be 7.5 out of 10 on TRM.
The scores are color coded as follows:
— (0 to 4.9) Poor Rating (Red)
— (5 to 5.9) Average Rating (Yellow)
— (6 to 10) Good Rating (Green).

The second movie rating is the Audience score, which is an aggregate (simple average) of all the ratings for that movie, from our users. This is also on a scale of 1 to 10.

We are continually trying to build our database for films released in the past years and decades. This process is time-consuming and laborious, and although we are pretty good at gathering information for all the new movies, including their reviews, doing so for older films, especially the ones from the pre-internet age is a challenging task.

Our goal is to eventually add regional films from all over India. We have already started the legwork on Tamil and Telugu films. And we hope to soon add Marathi, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Gujarathi, Punjabi and Konkani films. Due to our limited resources, this may take some time. If there is a particular film which you think we must have right now, please feel free to contact us about it. We are always happy to hear from you.

You can start by signing up for an account on TRM, either by using an email address or using your facebook or google account. We encourage you to use your facebook/google account as it is easy to log in and share your activity with your friends. We also automatically connect your facebook friends who are also registered on this site to your ‘followers’ list to make it easier for you to view their favorite movies and ratings.

You can always browse or search for movies at any time without having to log in. Once you’ve registered and activated your account, you can start to rate and review movies and help the community through your voice.

If you write film reviews for a web publication or in traditional media and would like to be featured on our site, please contact us at thereviewmonk@gmail.com with a few links to your reviews. We will be happy to go over your content and include your reviews in the future as long as our current criteria are met.