The Good, The Bad, and The Rotten Tomato

“I pretty much see movies all day,” Rafer Guzman told Baruch College Now’s journalism students at the end of July at the Vertical Campus.

To many kids and young adults, watching movies all day for a living sounds fun. But to professional movie critic Rafer Guzman, it can get “frustrating at a certain point, because sometimes, there’s just nothing to say– but you have to say something.”

“You have to see absolutely everything, even if you don’t like it,” Guzman explained.

But Guzman doesn’t mind seeing terrible movies because he believes that “you always learn about what makes movies good or bad.” Many reviews by Guzman will include what he thought the director did well, or which scenes worked or failed.

It wasn’t until after Guzman graduated when he started to critique movies.

“I had no idea what I was doing with my life at all… There was no grand plan from the very start,” he said.

All Guzman knew was that he liked movies and music, that he watched a lot of movies, and that he listened to a lot of music.

Guzman told the students that he started writing freelance movie reviews at 26 and sold them to companies willing to publish his reviews.

Since then, Guzman has published over 900 reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, which have appeared in publications such as the Boston Phoenix, the Los Angeles Times, and Newsday.