\u201ca gilded trash remake of The Zone of Interest\u201d<\/a> and \u201ctwo hours of pure, endless hell\u201d.<\/p>\nBut audiences appear to have felt otherwise, leading to a record-breaking gap between the aggregate critics\u2019 score and audience members\u2019 equivalent on reviews curation site Rotten Tomatoes.<\/p>\n
On that site its official reviews rating is just 8%, yet it has a 99% score from cinemagoers on the \u201cPopcornmeter\u201d, with one user praising \u201cthe best documentary I\u2019ve seen in years. The cinematography was superb, the soundtrack was excellent, and Melania herself was spectacular, a great movie which should receive numerous awards\u201d.<\/p>\n
Rotten Tomatoes\u2019s parent company Versant has rejected speculation that the latter figure was the result of a flood of fake reviews, telling Variety \u201cthere has been NO manipulation on the audience reviews for the Melania documentary\u201d.<\/p>\n
They added: \u201cReviews displayed on the Popcornmeter are VERIFIED reviews, meaning that it has been verified that users have bought a ticket to the film through Fandango\u201d.<\/p>\n
However, there appears to be a striking disparity between the warmth of those reviews labelled \u201cverified\u201d because the users have bought a ticket through a particular site and those collected in \u201call audience reviews\u201d \u2013 which do not count towards its rating.<\/p>\n
The former contains \u2013 as the 99% rating suggests \u2013 blanket praise and evangelism, with users urging \u201cevery red blooded American to see this movie to recognise the grace, sophistication and power of Flotius [sic]\u201d and applauding the lack of nudity and profanity.<\/p>\n
The users commenting appear in the overwhelming majority to be first-time posters, for whom Melania is their first review.<\/p>\n
Critiques in the \u201call audience reviews\u201d section tend to derive from accounts with a deeper prior engagement on the site, and include assessments such as \u201cI thought it would have been based on her actual life, good and bad. There was no emotion, drama or depth. It\u2019s just a bad reality show,\u201d and \u201cHot garbage. Don\u2019t waste your time or money.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Melania, Brett Ratner\u2019s authorised documentary following the first lady in the 20 days preceding Donald Trump\u2019s January 2025…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":275578,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[430,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-275577","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrities","8":"tag-celebrities","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275577","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=275577"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/275577\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/275578"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=275577"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=275577"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=275577"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}