With Margaret and David’s last episode of At the Movies going to air Tuesday evening, I thought it would be worth taking another look at the vast body of reviews produced by the pair.

What are their most lauded genres? Favourite directors? Which movies are perfect in their view?

In September, I looked at the most divisive films from their ABC tenure to date. However, that post missed many older reviews from the duo’s time at The Movie Show on SBS, which produced some of their most memorable ones, such as their famous disagreement about Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark.

I’ve now added a small portion of their SBS reviews to my dataset which, combined with the ABC reviews, gives us a more complete dataset from their career. Unfortunately, most of their earlier reviews don’t appear on the archived SBS site.

In addition to the review scores, I’ve added genres, directors, year of release, the first two actors listed, and a few other things using the Rotten Tomatoes API. You can read more details about the methods below.

First up, here’s the list of films to which they both gave a perfect score:

Along with modern films such as Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain, there are a few classics in there which were reviewed when the films were re-released at the cinema.

Here’s an updated list of the most divisive films, with a difference of three or more between the two:

Von Trier is the only director to have two films in the list, The Idiots and Dancer in the Dark. In both cases Margaret rated the movies far more highly than David, who gave both films zero stars. Margaret only has one film with zero stars in the list, which is Mel Gibson’s Payback.

Margaret and David also scored certain genres higher than others. Here’s the average rating for all films by genre, excluding genres that had 10 films or fewer on the list:

Both rated documentaries and art house films higher than others on average. Margaret’s least favourite genre was romance, and David’s least favourite genres were horror and comedy.

As for directors, here’s a list of those whose films they consistently rated higher than others. This shows the mean scores for films grouped by the director, where the director has had two or more films reviewed:

Jane Campion’s films In the Cut, Bright Star, and Holy Smoke all received very high scores from Margaret and David, putting her at the top of the list by combined score. Of the top 20, Lee has had the most films reviewed on the list, with seven movies and a combined average rating of 8.57.

Methods

I collated 2,036 reviews from At the Movies from the ABC website. The Movie Show reviews are thanks to the Internet Archive’s preservation of 1,170 reviews listed on the old SBS site and reddit user NoelGalaga for scraping said archive.

I used the Rotten Tomatoes search API to add genre, director, and other information based on the movie title, using fuzzy string matching to control for differences between titles returned from the Rotten Tomatoes database and the original titles.

Not all movies were found by the API search, and some may be matched erroneously to other titles. The archived SBS site did not distinguish between zero-star reviews and where one reviewer was absent, so I double-checked the most divisive movie list by watching the review videos. Here’s the full dataset, please get in touch if you spot any errors.

Update

Ketan Joshi has produced some graphs using this dataset:

Margaret and David versus Rotten Tomatoes user ratings:

Actors by lowest average combined score:

And David Johnson has added movie length: