Evaluative Judgements, Negative Reviews and ‘Objective Culture’: The Critical Reception of Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With reference to 81 film reviews written by critics from the US, the UK, Australia, Ireland, India, Canada, Cyprus, China and Singapore, this article examines the critical reception of Woody Allen’s A Rainy Day in New York during a time when his private life was under renewed scrutiny. It contributes to cultural sociological debates on taste and aesthetic value by examining various dimensions of the critics’ evaluative judgements, drawing attention to field-specific aesthetic criteria, which refer to the state of play in the field of cinema, and ethical or value-oriented judgements, which have their origin beyond this field and refer to allegations against him. But the article does more than this: In adapting insights from Georg Simmel’s notion of objective culture, the analysis of the reviews, many of which are negative, alludes to a temporal dimension, drawing attention to the aesthetic value that has accumulated to Allen’s work over the decades, deriving from institutional cultural capital, countless positive reviews and the utterances of fans. The article offers insights into the critical reception of the film in the moment and the longer game of aesthetic value accrual but also highlights the uncertain future of this body of aesthetic value, especially given the allegations against Allen.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".