Not everything released gets reviewed, and the selection is not a judgment of quality made in advance. It is a resource allocation decision taken weeks before anything is watched.
Coverage is planned against a calendar
Editors work from release schedules assembled months ahead, marking which titles will draw search interest and which will generate discussion regardless of quality.
Staff time is the binding constraint. A reviewer can produce a limited number of considered pieces per week, and that number sets the ceiling on coverage.
Freelance budgets extend the ceiling but not indefinitely, so the calendar is filled from the top down and smaller releases compete for whatever remains.
Access determines what is even possible
Reviews of films and series depend on screeners or press screenings, and distributors decide who receives them and when.
A title withheld from press until release cannot be reviewed early, which affects both the publication's planning and the review's eventual usefulness.
Smaller outlets often receive access later than large ones, which pushes them toward coverage of titles the majors overlook, since being late on a major title has little value.
Audience data shapes the mix
Publications know which categories their readers actually read, and that knowledge accumulates over years of measured behavior.
An outlet whose audience reliably reads horror coverage will staff for horror, and will cover more of it than its share of releases would justify.
This produces genuine gaps rather than a neutral survey. A release outside an outlet's demonstrated interests can go unreviewed despite being well regarded.
Timing rules constrain publication
Embargoes set when a review may appear, and outlets that break them risk losing access to future titles from that distributor.
Because everyone publishes near the same moment, position in search results and social feeds is decided by minutes, which pressures reviewers to file early.
The pressure is real but bounded. Most publications would rather be slightly late than publish a piece the writer had no time to think about.
Who is assigned changes the review
Editors match a title to a critic with relevant knowledge, since a reviewer familiar with a genre evaluates a new entry against the right comparisons.
The same film given to a critic outside its tradition produces a legitimate but different piece, measured against different expectations.
Readers rarely see the assignment logic, which is part of why two respectable outlets can reach opposite conclusions without either being careless.