When sites have both experts and user reviews, many of them mix the two and melt them together. Which I never find to be a good option for readers & users to come to the site to find. Although I always like the idea of having both types of reviews, there needs to be a difference in either design or concept, that separates the two different reviews. Luckily Metacritic does that. They do this in two different ways. The first way is separating the reviews in different areas, and the 2nd is giving the two different grading scales.
Firstly the site has a way of letting you know, with colors, whether a movie is good or not. There is a three level rating system; red meaning bad, yellow meaning average, and green meaning good (pictured above). When you select a specific film you instantly know what reviewers (both experts & users) thought of the film. The difference between user & expert ratings is that the experts ratings is based off of a scale of 1-100. This gives a critics review to be much more specific and pin points more precisely what they thought of the film. On the other hand the users reviews is only on a scale of 1-10. It is nice to see though sometimes the difference between the reviews of experts & users. For example, Predators received a 54 by critics (which is yellow) but users gave it a green 7.0.
Overall do I find the site to be credible? Absolutely. They seem to have a great system that is determined to be the definitive site for compiling reviews from all things film, tv, games, & music. Their system is easy, helpful, and I think more precise then Rotten Tomatoes. I also like that the users vote is shown above, but not spotlighted like the critics reviews. That comes first, and user reviews come 2nd on the site, which in the end makes Metacritic an overall credible site.
What you said was solid; how you arranged it on the digital page, though, made it difficult to read/scan. (Guess I'm a few trick pony about what I want to see in a blog post.) :)
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